Uprooted
by son-of-puji
Summary: This time it's Keefe who wants to finish the job, and it forces Lisa and Jackson, two enemies blind with hatred and anger, on a hopeless, unwanted mission. Is there anything beyond hostility for them? And if so, wouldn't it be their undoing?
1. Square one

**A/N:** This time it's Keefe who wants to finish the job, and it forces Lisa and Jackson, two enemies blind with hatred and anger, on a hopeless, unwanted mission. Is there something beyond hostility for them? And if so, wouldn't it be their undoing?

**Disclaimer: **Sometimes I have red eyes. Does it entitle me to own this? I don't think so.

So here I go again with a new Red Eye story. Hope you're gonna like it. It's a bit darker, definitely more serious than Cruise control if you happened to read that one: I'm trying to create a reasonable emotional progression here, hope I won't fail:P  
Sorry for all kinds of mistakes, unfortunately I'm not a native speaker.

* * *

**Uprooted**

**Chapter 1: Square one**

Heroics won't feed you.

This was the first thought creeping in Lisa's mind the morning she exited her manager's office at the Lux Atlantic Resort – as it appeared, most probably for the last time. Very politely, very apologetically but just as much matter-of-factly she was shown the door. Not more than four weeks after the- fascinating, if the newspapers were concerned; unfortunate, according to the CEOs of the hotel; nightmarish, if she was asked- events of the attempted murder against Charles Keefe and an undoubtedly unproductive month of sales at the hotel, Lisa found herself unemployed. Through the betrayal- and hurt-induced fog in her mind, somewhere deep in the forthrightness of her analytical side, she acknowledged what an inconvenient situation the hotel was facing but it didn't make it any easier. She had devoted her life to them, always available, always reliable, and though only she was aware that she had needed them just as much as they needed her, it didn't change the fact that she felt somewhat betrayed. Of course, they had to find someone responsible for the poor figures and decreasing number of guests, the slur on their reputation, and since they certainly couldn't blame an unknown, mysterious crime organization, it was obvious she had to carry the can. Their trust, and thus, all the guests' trust in her wavered; after all, she put the hotel with its guests and crew in danger by playing along in the game of a terrorist. What assured she wouldn't do it again? This was their point of view.

It was just ironic she was dismissed the exact same day Jackson Rippner was transported to a high security solitary confinement at the Florida State Prison after a one-month long hospital treatment at the, ironical enough, Jackson Memorial in Miami. It seemed petty heroics such as sending a criminal behind bars and saving human lives (and not just that but the very symbol the position of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, that is Charles Keefe, possessed) really weren't of great weight when it came to the Profit and Loss statement.

So Lisa collected her personal belongings in a cardboard box, hugged a very solemn Cynthia and left. Not that there was much to pack apart from a family photo, a spare white blouse on the hanger, two pot plants and her chipped LisAtlantic mug. Chipped and cracked. Why she couldn't just discard it was almost ridiculous. She was one of those people who rather kept old, battered objects until they were of no use anymore than throwing them out at the first sign of wear. It was the same with everything else in her life. She preserved all those chipped mug emotions and memories that should have been long forgotten; instead she was collecting her own terracotta army of hurts and fears and pain. The Keefe case was the newest piece of broken porcelain she put on the shelf. Moving on, looking forward: her late grandmother's motto sounded elevated but wasn't anything that could be adopted overnight. Maybe she wasn't too comfortable with adapting to changes. And maybe because the changes were rarely the result of her decision.

Just as the kiss-off she was so ungratefully given.

: :

During the following weeks she had enough, too much actually, time to assess her situation. It took just as much courage as the events that made her end up here because being downright honest and clear-sighted was incredibly draining. In hindsight, everything was obvious and maybe even better this way but she had been too prone to ignore the signs. When the first days of shock following the flight had worn off and she was back in the rut, the underlying truth that she had gone through irreversible changes in the few hours on the plane and at her father's house was suppressed by flagging it as weariness. However, with every passing day it was harder to keep up the façade, to smile and please and submit to whatever nuisance the guests could come up with, now that Rippner had ripped off her mask and shredded it and showed her her own reflection, the raw bruised flesh underneath. And the power that rippled below the surface. The same power that had defeated him was now making her impatient in every faked moment of her life. She couldn't go back to whom she had been before the red eye and maybe somewhere deep she didn't even want to. That Lisa and the other from before the parking lot accident had been definitely gone. She had to find a place for the new one and it was a difficult task.

She resorted to exercise to let off steam. Apart from the adrenaline-rush, the only thing that had saved her in the footrace at the airport was the occasional jogging she had engaged in. Ever since the red eye, she had taken it seriously and the once occasional activity turned into regular, almost self-punishing running. She kept pushing her own limits, her body over the edge and coaxing the last bit of energy out of her muscles by mocking herself '_If it was a chase, you'd already be dead'_. That always helped (the years-long deliberate and conscious loneliness made her comfortable about talking to herself without considering it insane), and her inner voice, the perpetual fighter retorted with a determined '_I won't be dead, Jackson Rippner'_. It was always him, the scourge, the motivation to exercise as hard as she could. No matter he was in prison for- hopefully- the next decade: he represented the threat, danger in itself. It could have been the _other man_ but of his face she didn't remember much, didn't have the stomach to remember and what she could recall- the smell, the touch, the pain and the animalistic, beastly rattle-, still flooded her with bilious disgust; that face was outlined with defeat, unable to stimulate her into anything more than self-destruction and cowering. She _knew_, it was a fact, that she had the vigor to wallop Rippner with luck and determination, and she had to bear this in mind and never let go again.

During those post-flight days, crushed under the exhaustion and the belated comprehension of the gravity and reality of her latest adventure, she tried to sort out the tangle of emotions and thoughts in her mind. It had been a very confusing period, and during the course of the assessment of damages she was forced to open a paragraph for Rippner. The heading started with the most confusing revelation: she didn't want him to die but not for any humanitarian reasons. It was utterly selfish. She called the hospital to get some information about his recovery, and when they said they weren't allowed to provide it over the phone, her anxiety brought her so far that she visited him. Unwilling to enter the secured ward, she merely stole a glance at him through the round window of the door. Thank God, he was asleep. He looked so pathetically vulnerable among the creepers of wires from the IV, the respirator, the heart monitoring machines and the chain cuffing him to the rail around the bed that the pity she felt, mixed with wavering guilt and anger and triumph helped her to overcome any fear she might have had of him. It took her long days of complete honesty to herself to come to the conclusion she didn't want him to die because she didn't want to live with the weight of the death of a human being, a death she had partaken in along with her father. She didn't want to think of them as murderers, even if it counted as self-defense it would have been a murder nonetheless. It was enough to digest that she had run over his associate. She'd known nothing about that man though, not even his name, had never talked to him and couldn't even make out his features in the brief moments before the crash – hitting him was akin to colliding with a fireplug. A crash test dummy. Rippner was different; they had interacted, there was a flesh and blood person, however monstrous and devoid of humane quality, behind the mere mortality data. And in a way it was worse.

It annoyed her to no end how she could misjudge him so badly when she was used to dealing with all kinds of people on daily basis. She would always know what tone and words had to be used, in most cases she could decide the best way to act after a mere glance – and in that aspect, and it was terrible to admit, she wasn't unlike Rippner. With him it had happened differently. Maybe because, in a very weak moment, she _wanted_ to believe he was different and sincere and it was real. She should have known, he was too smooth, too charming to be true, to be interested in her just like that, so easily.

: :

Her dismissal was followed by three very frustrating weeks. She was sulking in her apartment all day, feeling sorry for herself. She was lost, so terribly lost; she couldn't remember a time when she had felt the same. Two years back, after the incident she didn't want to think of, she had been on the verge of complete psychic annihilation, and the only thing that could pull her out of misery was the comforting routine of her work. Now she had nothing and it made her hate Rippner with every single fiber in her body. The mere thought of him lolling about his cell, taking long naps, reading or watching TV, fed and well-kept as if he was in some kind of a wellness centre while she had to build up her life from its ashes enraged her. The least he deserved was a filthy rathole of a prison somewhere in the Far East. It very much felt like _she_ got punished instead of him.

No trial had been scheduled yet for which she was extremely grateful. The mere thought of facing him again at the court, and laying out the details of their hideous encounter in public made her head spin. It had been more than enough to give her evidence over and over again to the police and then later a very attentive FBI agent. They collected every incriminating evidence they could: his cell phone was retrieved from the stolen car and they found the number of the dead assassin among the last incoming calls; in his suit pocket he still had the wallet with the embedded JR on it, full of -fake- credit cards issued for Jackson Rippner but, strangely, he hadn't thrown out the picture of Lisa her father would always keep there – maybe he planned to prove his point if Lisa happened to question the original owner of the wallet; or so they guessed. With her statement they assured her he would be sentenced to a long imprisonment for attempted murder.

The triumph, the pride that had reigned over her after thwarting his sick plans, the wake of the fighter within her dissolved after acknowledging the string of absurd events in her life; mind-crashing events that, one would think, always happened to only others. Somehow she seemed to be a magnet of trouble, and it left nothing but deep-rooted fatigue and languor behind. She was aware of what she was capable of, very much aware, but it was still dreary how her life had turned into something uncontrollable at some points. She didn't even question what made her deserve this – there was no point in asking it.

In the idleness of the upcoming period Lisa picked up a new disturbing habit. She started to make comments about every mundane act during the day like she was watching herself from a distance. Very sarcastic comments at that, which didn't quite carry her usual tone.

_The mark met her father twice this week, and that was all the social contacts she made. _

_On Tuesday she slept in again; late night movies the previous evening. _

_At the grocery she bought two boxes of cinnamon cereal though there is still a half-full box in her cupboard. _

_The mark woke up at 2.48am -third time this week-, shuffled out in the kitchen and made scrambled eggs. Two eggs, slightly salted, topped with smoked cheese._ Just to defy whoever had to be defied, sometimes she would opt for a French toast instead.

Methodically, she started to clean out her life, corner by corner. The dr. Phil books were the first in the row, refusing the memories that clung on them like heavy dust covers, and with that refusing the need for half-professional -or any at all- psychiatric help. Once again, Rippner managed to make her feel lonelier than ever before. Then she continued with old clothes, furniture, mugs even. The next victims were a very natural consequence of the spring-cleaning: she, slowly, almost instinctively started to leave out all the habits that had surely been witnessed by Rippner, and then one day she perceived she had no more habit at all. She wouldn't drink a Sea Breeze anymore or anything with sweetened vodka for that matter; no more scrambled eggs late in the night; no more old movies on Saturday evenings. And suddenly she realized her life was empty, completely cleaned out of everything she had ever liked. Maybe it was an involuntary wish to change her life, maybe discarding innocent objects that had been tainted with his unwanted, intrusive attention gave her the false impression that she could discard hateful memories too. She planned to move into a new apartment, because the old one made her cringe every time she entered it, in her mind's eye seeing him watching her, being the witness of the personal details of her life.

Starting everything from ground zero, it was like a rebirth but without the lofty, optimistic meaning to it. It was nothing more than being alone, in pain, cold and frightened. And screaming, more figuratively here, _wanting_ to scream, to be precise, at the top of her voice.

She sent her CV to every hotel in Miami, later in Orlando, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. In fact, it was undoubtedly an impressive résumé, having achieved a managerial position at such a young age in a well-known hotel was something anyone would die for. She could have been the front office manager in any hotel hadn't her name appeared on the news hundred times. All it took was a simple Google search and every detail of the predicament the journalists could dig out lay there, sometimes distorted, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes roughly outlined. Of course, it was the typical case of fifteen minutes of fame, fortunately she didn't have to be afraid that someone would recognize her in the streets but still it was a major drawback in trying to find a job in hotel business; the name Lisa Reisert in connection with the Lux Atlantic as her previous workplace rang a certain bell that should have never been rung.

: :

Give as good as you get.

Two hurricane-ridden but otherwise eventless days into the fourth eventless week of unemployment the phrase presented its positive meaning to her. Her cell phone chirped and it was none other than Charles Keefe on the other end of the line. As it turned out he was in Miami again, staying at the Lux Atlantic, maybe to show his confidence in the hotel, and learnt at once that she was no longer an employee there. Lisa, maybe as a part of the cautiousness toward anyone after her horrible experiences or maybe it was simply pride, usually tried to avoid any situation where she would end up being obliged for anything from letting a stranger pay for her drink to accepting a job that terribly sounded like alms. She hated to be pitied and she certainly didn't expect Keefe to provide anything that even remotely could have been labeled as charity, not even if it was an honest act to show his gratitude. However, when Keefe offered her the position of his personal assistant who was about to go on maternity leave, Lisa found herself accepting it with enthusiasm, even though she still cringed at the idea of owing anybody.

She agreed to meet Keefe the following day to discuss the position offered. Keefe seemed to be engaged in a week-long work that left him with no time for anything else, so she had to visit him at the FBI Field Office in Miami. The grayish building with its enormous black tinted windows was vaguely familiar to her. A few weeks back she'd had to visit the FBI agent here for her last statement on the Keefe case.

The job seemed enthralling, something new where Lisa could still wander about the well-known territory of people pleasing and helpfulness without the nonstop fake smiles and the compulsion to endure the insignificant complaints of over-clamorous guests. If she accepted, and she was very much about to do so, among a lot of other things she would have been responsible for Keefe's travels to the very last details; and that was a familiar realm. There were two cons she had to consider though, and one was that she had to move to Washington, leaving her home town and her father behind. It was the hardest part, sailing off from the safe haven. The other con seemed a bit ridiculous compared to the job offered: she would have to travel a lot, follow Keefe wherever he might go and considering how much she hated flying, it wasn't anything she couldn't wait for.

After a long debate with herself then with her father, she agreed and signed the contract and the Non-disclosure agreement already the next day. The diversity of the position was irresistible and finally she could tell with great contentment that the importance matched the responsibility. Lisa found herself enthusiastic about the challenge behind it.

Janine, whose pregnancy was now more evident than two months back when Lisa had last met her, tried to brief her as often and thoroughly along the line as possible. Lisa accompanied her as she was following Keefe around the FBI quarter, took notes and attempted to understand the procedures and jargon unfolding before her. The IT support section was yet to create her a username and password, thus without a profile she had to use Janine's who showed her all the routines, regulations and history they usually complied with.

The day after, Keefe was continuously in and out of meetings with a small group of FBI operatives, so Lisa had no chance to speak with him before he would leave for Washington the same afternoon. She still had quite a lot of things to arrange and couldn't even guess when she would be available for work.

Lisa buried herself behind a laptop at an open station opposite the conference room Keefe frequently disappeared in, and examined the programs and sites Janine had granted her access to. The FBI office was buzzing around them, and Lisa suddenly found herself soothed by the continuous noise, half-grunted commands and relentlessly ringing phones. The life at the Lux hadn't been that quiet either so the familiarity put her at ease.

Keefe showed up at their desk: all manners, as always, with a slight tension on his face. "Janine, could you please move my Monday appointment with Carter to the second half of the week? Try to find a date suitable for both of us."

Before Janine could even nod, the attentive FBI agent Lisa had previously met -Alvarez, as she finally recalled the name- walked up to them, cell phone in hand, held a few inches away from his ear.

"They've just left the institute, Mr. Keefe."

"Good. That gives us about…?"

"Thirty minutes, sir."

"Perfect. Stay on the alert. I'll be right back," Keefe nodded intently. As Alvarez left, he turned to them and looked at Lisa as if he was seeing her for the first time. "Ms. Reisert, my apologies, I forgot to tell you, you could leave for today. My schedule got very hectic and I will need Janine all day, so there is no point in keeping you here. We will talk later, okay?"

"Of course."

Lisa watched Janine get up and following Keefe in the conference room. She didn't feel like leaving yet, it wasn't even lunch time and since she had yet to contact the HR department in Washington, she decided to arrange it via email. They promised to find her a suitable condo somewhere not too far from the Nebraska Avenue where the Department of Homeland Security was located, and briefed her with all the other details concerning her move. She contacted a removal company her father had recommended and arranged a date for the moving.

There was a slight commotion at the entrance of the floor, and when she looked up and spotted a small group of people, guards and agents mostly (and the emphasis was on this trifling word 'mostly'), entering the premise, her first thought was a very strange and resigned one that wasn't unfamiliar at all for it had crossed her mind not once in the past few years: it seemed the most hideous events that later turned out to be a pivotal point in her life happened on painfully ordinary days. Nothing in the morning would predict the change, no sleeping in, no spilled coffee on her white shirt, no finding her car with a flat tire, no overcast sky. No one throwing offensive insults at her. No foreboding at all. Just like the day of the parking lot disaster. She had woken up to a sunny day, made coffee, washed her face, dressed in a flowery summer dress and sung along with the radio - just like the day before, and the day before that and so on. The almost same routine happened two months back, apart from the fact that she had to attend her grandma's funeral on the day of the flight, and that she wouldn't wear a flowery dress anymore but all in all, that day was somewhat mundane either. Just like this morning. Nothing had told her it would be a day when her knees buckle beneath her.

She stood abruptly, the swivel chair spinning behind her back. The only contentment she could find in the situation was the evidence that Jackson Rippner was just as much surprised to see her as she was to see him. She didn't trust her own legs, jelly knees, sponge joints, so she stayed rooted to the spot, half leaning against the desk for support. Rippner was led along the wide corridor between the desks, handcuffed and escorted by two guards in uniforms with a blue badge on the chest. Before they reached her desk, he turned his head toward the jailers and said something in a quite peremptory manner. They halted, and the next moment Rippner stepped to her desk clear of the guards.

"What a reception, I have to say I'm flattered! Have been dying to see me, Leese?"

His voice was the same she remembered from the plane, and somewhere back in her mind she noted disappointedly that the homemade tracheotomy left no impact on it. He looked thinner though, and even paler, his hair longer. Judging by the size, the dark blue shirt he was wearing was clearly not his, at least one size larger than necessary. The look, the maliciously blinking blueness of his eyes were the same though, and just as disturbing as in her memories.

"In such company, yeah," Lisa nodded toward the security guards, and was relieved that her voice came out steadier than how she was feeling. Her remark had no visible effect on him apart from the twitch of an eyebrow. "What are you doing here?"

This time he let the mocking surprise through. "So you don't know?" And he was back in smug mode again. Lisa balled her hands into fists, fighting the urge to smack him. "I would never miss a good deal. You gotta love the juridical system of this wonderful country. Sadly, its loopholes put all your heroics in vain."

Lisa, intent on hiding the fact that she didn't get a single word of his insinuations, gestured toward the handcuffs. "I like your new accessories. They suit you just fine."

Suddenly he leaned closer, and Lisa was grateful anew for the desk between them. His voice was low and full of unconcealed venom. "Do you have nightmares of me, Leese?"

"And _do you_ have? After all, if I am not mistaken, it was _me_ who thrashed you."

She could tell he was preparing a blow by the way his upper lip curled into a taut smile. "Soon I'll be free and you can relish in your fair share of nightmares."

She couldn't help but recoil as if he had hit her. Eventually she was saved by the guards nudging him from behind. "Come on, Rippner, move."

He cast one last self-satisfied glance at her and walked on. Lisa followed his steps numbly, and realized belatedly that Keefe was standing beside her desk.

"You are still here," it was a statement, a bit apologetic as if it was his fault that she hadn't left the office yet. "I wanted to spare you this encounter, Ms. Reisert."

"He said… Why is he here?" she mumbled, fixating on the door behind which Rippner had disappeared, as if trying to convince herself that it was only a hallucination.

'I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't tell you that. It is confidential. Why don't you go home, and I promise I'll call you in the afternoon."

Even when Keefe had long retreated back to the conference room, Lisa stayed rooted to the spot. _Go home, curl under the blanket and pretend this never happened._ She really wanted to do it. Denial was a good old friend.

When she started toward the restroom to steal some time alone, she came across with the two uniformed guards on their way back to the entrance. She stared at their blue badge and shook her head.

"Everglades C.I.? I thought he was kept at the Florida State Prison."

One of them gave her a long guarded glance. "He is. Temporarily he was moved to Everglades a few days ago."

Before she could ask anything else, they were off.

Fortunately the restroom was empty. Lisa splashed water on her face and stared at the miserable woman in the mirror she could hardly recognize. Somehow, and it was disturbing, meeting him shook her more than she would have anticipated. The last time she saw him, he wasn't even able to go to the toilet alone or at all, and in cherishing this memory, reveling in the false belief that he was harmless now, she happened to forget how menacing he could be, how cruelly spot-on about the impact of his words, how his eyes and voice could deliver something exactly opposite than what he displayed. As she let hatred engulf her in a hope that she could suck every ounce of willpower out of it, a faint realization dawned on her. There was no way she would go home and wait for Keefe's call, she just couldn't do it. Sitting idly and staring into space, starting at every sound, counting the minutes while he was here, in the same city, without the reassuring iron bars and bricks and barbed wire fence and armed jailers around him – the mere thought made her sick to the stomach. Whatever Rippner was referring to with his last remark, whether it was true or just an empty threat, there certainly was something fishy, something she surely wouldn't like, about his and Keefe's appointment here.

She returned to her desk with the determination to get to the bottom of this case, no matter how much she had to wait.

Minutes or hours went by, she couldn't tell through the mind-numbing turbulent thoughts raging in her head. One minute she wanted to call her father but the next she realized there wasn't too much she could tell him, and the last thing she wanted was him starting to worry just because she couldn't bottle up her fear, revulsion and loathing of Rippner.

That was when the front wall of the conference room dissolved with a deafening bang, followed by a mild series of explosion from around the premise.

Lisa was thrown out of her chair, less by the impact and more out of an instinctive reaction to cower. Within a few seconds the office sank into frenzied panic as smoke, so dense and opaque Lisa had never experienced, filled the room. There were a few shouts, another sound of explosion filtering in from the ground floor but Lisa didn't pay attention. Choking at the throat-scratching smoke and her own tears, squinting her stinging eyes, only one horrible thought could reach through the incredulity binding her mind. _It is happening again; another attempt on Keefe's life._

She scrambled to her feet and stumbled in the direction where she guessed the conference room was. In the darkened room she almost fell through someone who was wheezing on all fours, then evading the figure she ran into another one, the momentum repulsing her backwards.

She recognized him just a fraction before he did and caught him off-guard by lurching at him. In the stupefaction of the previous minutes she had completely forgotten about Rippner but his sudden manifestation before her made the pieces of puzzle clash in her head, forming a very likely and worrisome image. It was just too obvious, too clear right now.

"You! Get off-!" His grumble got lost in a croak, and instead of talking he tried to yank his arm free. Lisa, an adrenaline-shot exploding in her stomach, clung onto him, desperate to make him stay till a security guard would come to her help. Rippner, with an incomprehensible growl, grabbed her hair and pulled her away from him.

"No…!" she shrieked and as soon as he turned to leave she lashed out again, knocking him down from behind. In the debris he lost his footing but immediately pushed himself off the floor. Before Lisa could even blink, he whirled around and the feral sneer that appeared on his face coiled her stomach into a small knot.

"Hell, why not…?" and he pulled her closer to him by the back of her neck, and with his left arm secured around her shoulders, he gnarled into her ear from behind her back. "Since you insist…"

With wide open eyes, Lisa's glance fell on the glinting object in his right hand just before he pressed the edge of the broken glass to the wildly pulsating vein in her neck.

"Be a good girl," Rippner tossed her forward and just when she regained her balance, he grasped her arm and dragged her along with him.

Between the realization that she was in an all too familiar trouble and the almost blinding pain he caused in her arm, all Lisa could focus on was her legs. She was sure if she fell he would lug her across the building by her hair. When they burst into the emergency staircase, she fought his grip but the strength he was clinging to her was so relentless that Lisa momentarily gave up resistance when it resulted in a misstep on a stair.

On the landing they ran into a guard. The moment he pulled out his gun, Rippner yanked Lisa to his chest and stuck the glass below her chin.

"Drop it!" he commanded, and as the guard hesitated, he stabbed it deeper in her skin. Lisa could feel the hot trail of blood running down her neck but bit back the whimper, not wanting to satisfy him or unsettle the guard. He was her last chance to get away from Rippner. "Drop it and kick it here _now_!"

His voice carried such power and coolness that Lisa involuntarily shivered. Horrified, she watched numbly as the guard obeyed, turning around when Rippner ordered him to do so. With a swift movement he bent down for the gun, and so quickly that Lisa couldn't even see it, knocked the guard out with the metal butt end. Before she knew it, they were out in the bright sunlight, running across the adjoining parking lot. Rippner slowed down, intently scanning the rows of cars. Behind them the western wall of the building was coughing black smoke toward the sky, and in the distance Lisa could already hear the sirens of fire-engines.

Suddenly, when his attention was occupied by the cars, she tore her arm from his grip and before he could recover she jumped into a full-fledged sprint. He shouted something that wasn't audible above the clicking of her shoes, and she chased the fact of him possessing a gun back in the depth of her mind. _Run, run, run_. Her world shrank into this single word. And she ran.

There was a loud creak, and simultaneously a painful pressure on her chest that pushed the air out of her lungs, a snap as the buttons on her suit jacket flew off. Lisa staggered to an abrupt halt, almost dove onto the concrete. She tried to quickly slip out of the jacket but Rippner was already blocking her way, keeping her in place by the shoulders.

Grinding her teeth, Lisa glared at him through the curtain of her hair and blind venom. "Let me go."

She kept him in the farthest possible distance her arms provided. Like logs, they pressed against his clavicles. Weak logs, though. Delicate logs, compared to his strength; she had to realize it the next minute.

"Be more consistent, Leese. Back inside you seemed to be eager to stick to me."

His irritated yet malicious grin, the parking lot, the smoke-spitting FBI building in the background, the shrill sound of sirens growing louder with each minute, even her desperately restrained fear splitting open inside her plunged into blackness as his forehead collided with hers with a brain-cracking noise.


	2. Ecce diabolus

**A/N:** Thank you so much for the comments, guys! Here is the next chapter.  
**To Isee:** Thanks for the suggestion about the paragraphs, I try to keep it in mind but sometimes I just don't find it possible from context point of view.

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**Chapter 2: Ecce diabolus**

Keeping the speed limit, trying not to run red lights. No honking, no sudden changing lanes. Filing in and running the twenty-minute distance in patience-taxing twenty-six minutes. Always blend in: one of the golden rules; it had never been so annoying, so nerve-racking. The Miami early afternoon traffic played polka on his taut nerves.

Rippner changed gears and took a right turn. The old piece of shit he had hot-wired at the FBI building coughed beneath him.

Three streets.

Two streets to go.

He took a quick glance at the passenger seat, and gripped the wheel harder. Of all people at that freaking FBI he had to run into Lisa Reisert. For a very tempting minute he had just wanted to lift his arm and crush her to death with one single blow. Then by being that thickheaded everyday superhero, she appointed herself to be his random sidekick of sort. What a retaliation – it was just as much a punishment for him as for her. If it wasn't for his own safety, he would simply open the door and kick her out of the car without slowing down. What slowing, he would even speed up…

She had been visibly shaken by his reappearance in her life, vulnerable in the sudden turn of events she couldn't follow, and two months ago it would have drawn a satisfied smile on his face, a smirk of utter control but he knew it better now. He could learn from his mistakes. The more lost and desperate she seemed the more dangerous, unpredictable and wacky she was likely to turn. Everyone had their limits, though, that was a fact. He would find hers. No time for playing around, no time for regulating her. It wasn't revenge; he didn't have either time or motivation for it. Though pulling her down with him, forcing her to tag along had definitely a sweet taste of vengeance – an enticing smack that would linger long in his mouth.

She was coming around. A flutter of eyelashes. He braced himself for a full-force tantrum. Good thing they were nearly there. She wouldn't hesitate to attack him during driving, and ending up against a lamp post was one of the last things on his priority list right now.

Lisa opened her eyes, closed it against the sunlight, the moving, running, jumping buildings beyond the glass, too fast and vivid for her sensitive eyes right now, and breathed in deeply. Then out. She could feel Rippner watching her. The headache came only third in the row.

Touching her forehead tentatively, she moaned, "Ugh, you jerk!"

"You can have aspirin when we get there."

"Get where?"

Rippner shot her a withering glance she failed to see. She was at it again. The questions. "You'll see soon. Now shut up, and if you so much as budge, I'll knock you out again."

"What do you want from me?"

"Quit the questions."

Lisa looked out the window. The surrounding streets were vaguely familiar, she had a faint idea which part of the city they were in. With that came the realization that no one else knew. With her heart beating against her ribs she unbuckled her seatbelt.

"I want to get out."

One lamp post. Two. Three. Four. A whole world of restraint was being collected. Maybe it wasn't such a smart idea to bring her along, Rippner pondered.

"If I were you I wouldn't piss me off because I get furious and we both know what happens then."

"You get, um, _professional_ and I beat the crap out of you?" Lisa quipped boldly.

Rippner's hand jerked. Lisa saw it just a fraction of a second before it lashed out but he was quicker, grabbed the hair at the back of her head and pulled her closer: "You are in deep shit without a smart mouth, so shut up already!"

He held her in place for a minute before letting her go with a rough pull at her hair. Whirled the wheel and stepped on the brake, he parked the car at the curb. Lisa looked at him expectantly.

"Get out."

Rippner was out and on the curb before her. Not remotely out of courtesy- they were both aware of that- he held the door for her. He seized her arm just above the elbow and started to stroll toward a row of six-storey apartment buildings.

At a gate he stopped abruptly, pulled her against it while he fumbled with a sign hanging from the wire fence. Two long pieces of wire, he tore them off and pocketed.

Right before they reached the entrance of the next building, reality finally delivered her a mental wake-up kick and Lisa tore her arm out of his grip. It was over though, before she could even think of a direction to bolt. He yanked her in the building like she was a rag doll.

A staircase, poorly lit, no windows, was behind the front door, deserted at this time of the day.

The blood was drumming in her ear almost deafeningly. Through the waves of headache Lisa tried to assess the situation. Rippner was on the run after attacking Keefe again and fleeing custody, and she had no idea how she fit in with any of this except for being the object of his payback. That she surely didn't want to be.

Rippner held her at arm length. She had a hard time to keep her eyes locked with his, not when she was so uncertain and in fear. She'd never planned to associate this word with him again but the exterior he was showing now was raw and without any attempt to conceal it with deceptive empathy or stoicism she had seen on his face back on the plane. He was frightening in his complete lack of mannerism.

"If you behave, you will live. Simple enough?" The patronizing tone returned to his voice.

She glared at him, trying to figure out if he knew how much it flared her temper, the tone, the glance. He wouldn't possibly wish to make her angry again, would he? Both of them were aware of the consequences of that, though she was sure he deemed her victory a one-hit wonder, and probably it really was, but it was safe to state if he had been cautious with her on the plane, he was twice as much now; and still, couldn't deny himself the obvious pleasure of lowering her.

He started up the stairs, wisely not waiting for a reply. She made his task troublesome by not channeling an ounce of momentum into her movements.

On the landing he shook her, somewhere near the end of his patience he tried not to reach. "Come on, Leese, don't want me to drag you because I swear I will."

Lisa only gave him a wry smile.

One more floor up. And another. The second door to the right, in a niche. Rippner kneeled down and pulled her with him – if she fled, she wouldn't start from a better position.

Lisa pushed up against the wall, as far from him as she could and he would let. His mere proximity rinsed her forehead with beads of cold sweat.

"What do you want from me? I'm not part of your plan, am I?" He was acting on impulse, she could tell it. The almost nonexistent impatience toward her had to emerge from the lack of control over the situation: he was concentrating on other things to solve, restraining her was on the edge of his focus.

Rippner stared at her, scrutinizing for a moment, then nodded. "You really weren't. You pretty much are now, though."

He retrieved the two five-inch long wires, bending them a few times with smooth, well-practiced movements. Lisa stared at him suspiciously.

"Whose place is it?"

"Mine."

Half-amused, she asked: "You pick the lock to your own apartment?"

"You know, I have the key with me but old habits die hard." His eyes not more than two sardonic slits.

She easily matched him with her own cynical retort. "No spare key under the doormat?"

Rippner simply ignored her. Finally a click and he smiled emptily. "Does it qualify breaking and entering?"

He stepped in first, took a long, expert look around and let her in, closing the door firmly behind her. The security system panel next to the entrance showed an empty display. _Splendid_; it had obviously been switched off. The flat, quite a mess, nothing the way he had left it two months earlier. The police had surely searched the flat, not once, but since their questioning was all along of those feeling about in the dark, they presumably weren't able to find anything useful. At a guess, and it was a safe guess, after all he knew the process very well, he assumed the Company had preceded them and cleared the place before the police and the Feds got here.

He remembered how he left the apartment, and considering the Cleaner had seen that state was embarrassing enough. He could recall every detail, every note and picture and post-it and fly paper of the Keefe folder (Reisert folder, more of that actually), how they littered every single square meter in the flat, little reminders, or more than that, some of them surely more than that – he ignored this fact completely now. Usually he wasn't so untidy; in fact, on the contrary, he prided himself on being overly discreet and collected in every aspect of his life and work.

That assignment had been meant to be shot to hell even before he flew off to Texas (where he had followed her even to the funeral, for crying out loud, like some goddamn Peeping Tom watching her weep and pour soil on the casket; what was it if not fucking amateurish) to catch the red eye; destined to crumble sometime around when he had started reasoning with himself, making up excuses why he should follow her even when it wasn't necessary for the job, why it was sensible to park with his car outside her flat when she inside, without doubt, was sleeping. Should have ended it about the time when he still was sober and rational enough to realize he was in big trouble, somewhere beyond a psychic overdose (overdose of folly, for sure, for he had disregarded his own code of conduct), but even then he wasn't worried enough about himself to abandon the whole damn assignment. There was a word, a name for this symptom but he was reluctant to attach it to himself. For someone who was an undeniably expert in anatomizing others' thoughts, instincts, reactions even before they would become conscious of them, pulling their personality apart with cold objectivity, dissecting them with accurate scalpel-cuts, it was pathetically ironic to be so blind about himself.

Though the pictures of her weren't littering the place anymore, and he was more than glad for that at the moment, she was, flesh and blood, and it was surreal: there where he'd been planning his scheme and thinking of her for so many long boring weeks. Thinking of her, assessing her, measuring, gauging, evaluating. Constructing an image of her- from professional and not so professional point of view- that later turned out to be fatally false. Who had failed him in the end was hard to tell: she or he? Probably both of them. Out of all people he ever had come across, worked with or surveilled, this ostensibly irksome, colorless woman had to be a fucking enigma. He glanced over at her, standing there and looking, _feeling_- he could see it- terribly out-of-place; she could have so much as sprung out of the portfolio of the photo series the Cleaner had removed. She looked the same, he looked the same. And neither of them was.

He shook himself out of the reverie; it was time to find out what the police and the Cleaner discovered and took. By her arm he pulled her with him along the hallway, yanking her to the middle of the bedroom.

"You stay there."

Lisa stared after him. Her instincts were in sleep mode. Something had glaciated inside her, froze into thick, cubicle obstacles she couldn't by-pass. Her eyes were searching for an appropriate weapon, but her mind wasn't on it. The faint chemical and dusty, stale smell of the flat, its general impersonality yet here and there spilled with not so neutral objects obviously his, the tones, the _fact_ of being in his apartment, all got to her head. He had surely been staying here while following her – that thought made every single hair on her arms stand on end.

Rippner was back before she knew it. A glass of water and a bottle of aspirin; he hadn't forgotten about her headache. She tried to hide her gratefulness; all things considered, it was ridiculous: the headache, the out-of-body sensation, the tension, they were all his fault. Manipulation again? Very likely.

Rippner stepped to the closet, tore up the doors and stood on tiptoes.

"Don't take the full bottle in your despair," voice drenched in sarcasm, as he glimpsed at her over his shoulder.

She gulped down the full glass of water with the pills. "You're not worth it."

He started rummaging on the upper shelf, pushing boxes to the floor. A fine string of curse as he realized: no weapons were left there. Someone had been very thorough.

Startled by the empty thuds of the boxes, his apparent strain that rippled under the surface like a current and wired his muscles, Lisa took an involuntary step back, hitting the side of his bed. For some reason the mere sight of it- the mattress, the metal headboard, the neglected wrinkled covers and sheets-, was unnerving; or rather, what they implied. The image, the fact. He would touch those blankets, sleep in there.

She shuddered, not really able to unravel what exactly disturbed her.

On the nightstand there was a book, and she, against her own will, so to say, eased closer. _American psycho?_, she guessed to entertain herself. That one would suit him. Squinting, she assessed it from inch to inch as if had never seen a book before. White block letters, faded orange cover, the one third of a single toothpick wrapped in the red-black promo pack of some café or restaurant sticking out from between the pages, serving as a bookmark - for the same purpose, as a rule she would use those little sugar packets that accompanied her usual cappuccino. The book: _A clockwork orange._ Suddenly she realized what she was feeling: disconnection. She closed her eyes. Something deep under the surface failed to click in place, something she still couldn't quite grasp. And this very something made her head spin. An old memory emerged: when she was a child, her brother had bet her one day that she wouldn't dare climb over the fence and swim in their neighbor's pool; she had won the bet, eventually, but the detached feeling, the slight dizziness reigning her movements made her heart tremble with anticipation; she'd felt as though someone else, an identical twin she was in mental connection with was trespassing. The sensation was the same now. She was somewhere she shouldn't have been, a place which was definitely outside her comfort zone.

When he strolled over to check the underside of the bed, Lisa stepped to the closet, keeping the distance she very much craved for now. They were moving around as if dancing along an orbital course. She leered in the dimness of the closet, contemplating: _Could I defeat him with a hanger? _Her grip tightened around the bottle of pills. She might need another two to snap her out of this numb state, to clear her hazy mind.

Neatly stacked rows of suits, pants, jackets, sport coats and shirts; American style, Italian style. She glared at them, the labels, the exquisite fabrics, the pastel tones, grays, browns, blacks. Hickey Freeman, Canali, Coppley. If it wasn't for the seriousness of her situation, she would have laughed at the obviously cherished Brioni's – if they were suitable for Britain's most famous super agent, they might be appropriate enough for super manager Jackson Rippner; uber-secretive tough guys seemed to share the same preference in clothing. If anything, he had an excellent taste, she had to give that to him.

On a nearby dresser she found a Longines watch, exactly the model her father received from his company as a retirement gift- how rude and tactless was that: giving watch to a retired man. Wouldn't it imply: time is ticking away?-, and the mere chance of it made her head reel. Out of nowhere Rippner grasped it out of her hand and clasped it around his wrist. He was seething with pent-up tension, she could see it clearly; it wasn't directed entirely at her, she saw that too.

Rippner rushed her out in the kitchen. "Stay here."

He kept a little package of survival kits here: a notebook, weapons, cell phone, credit cards, ID cards hidden even from the Company. Always have a Plan B; don't trust anyone: so far that philosophy kept him alive.

Lisa cautiously eyed him rushing over to one of the over-the-counter cupboards, ripping up the door and sweeping everything inside it on the floor. Boxes of cereals, ground coffee and tea pods landed on the floor, and she couldn't help but stare at them. And there, towering over a pile of food, the realization, the reason for the disconnection hanging from her shoulders ever since she'd stepped in this flat, finally became clear as a question fought its way to the front of her mind. _Does he really eat all these mundane things like other people? Normal, real people?_ She struggled to create the mental image of him spooning a bowl of cereal but failed. Somehow she thought he would feed on power and the glee of manipulating others. Discovering he had a human side with its physical limits and weakness, a seemingly normal life, sharing innocent habits with the rest of the human race, something less shady behind the intimidating and impersonal display of a relentless terrorist appeared to be too huge a bite to swallow.

With a swift movement he had hopped on the counter, and was now kneeling on it, prying off the back of the cupboard wall. Her gaze fell on the wire cutlery basket near the sink, at the black handle of a Wenger boning knife. She only had to take one step to the side and reach out with her arm. Another feeble attempt; she moved to the right, keeping an eye on his back, and was startled out of her skin when suddenly he jumped off the counter and whirled towards her.

"That was stupid. You know, I don't have time for your little games."

He had to have a third eye on the back of his head to see it coming. A sixth sense. Seventh, even. She refused the possibility that she was so easy to read.

She fought him all the way, numb from fear that he was about to kill her she delivered a good kick at his ankle while he was dragging her roughly to a door but eventually Rippner pushed her through it.

A click; the lock was turned.

Lisa panicked; it was dark and small, crowded in there. Involuntarily, as she tried to find her footing, she trashed around, thinking of all the items Rippner could be keeping there, incriminating things, chopped off body parts, knives- that thought, and a metal clink from somewhere behind made her cease all movements- _guns_? The last thing she wanted was accidentally tripping on one and shooting herself. Feeling around the door, beside it she finally found the switch. The light bulb illuminated a very ordinary looking closet, stuffed with cardboard boxes, empty suitcases and plastic bottles. Dread was quickly replaced by enflaming humiliation: Rippner had closed her among cleansing supplies.

For a minute, all thoughts went racing out of her mind. It was hard to decide which prospect was more frightening: if he would leave her here, locked in a closet, or if he would resume dragging her after him. For now, the latter held more appeal.

Pounding on the door angrily: "Rippner, let me out!"

No reaction. Not that she'd expected any.

Just when she was about to search for a flacon of bleach or hydrochloric acid to splash it in his face, the door opened. He was standing there with a designer leather bag on his shoulder and a laptop-size one in his left hand. With his right he reached in and grasped her by the arm.

"Time's up."

He had changed his clothes; black corduroy jeans, steel blue polo shirt under a sports coat, sneakers, sunglasses pushed over his forehead – for a minute it seemed like a costume, something he was hiding behind.

Out in the staircase, running down the flight of steps she struggled against his grip in a sudden surge of panic. "I won't go anywhere with you. Forget it."

He stopped, grasped her shoulder with his free hand, pushing her up against the rail with the weight of his body.

"If you don't stop whining, I have to kill you and I'll do it gladly."

"Really? Fine. Then kill me right now because I'm not going."

Rippner stared at her, pondering, seriously doing so, and pushing her backward.

"You know what? I'll just do it."

This time there was no mask, only the pure rage and hatred, he knew it, he let it leak through his normally indifferent expression so she would see what she had awakened two months ago. _Just keep it up, Leese, keep it up, keep it up-_

A mantra. A silent wish.

_Give me a reason._

One little shove; maybe the poisonous sticky mass within him would be shoved into the depth with her too; the failure, the bitterness, the fact that nothing was the same anymore. The fact that he had been a bloody unprofessional idiot. She made him that, reduced him into something he hadn't been for many, many years; if he had ever. And she was doing it again.

Lisa grabbed for the rail, frantically and in terror, bent over the depth and however she wanted to prevent, the little sound of a whimper escaped her throat. He had once thrown her off the stairs, a vivid memory and a discharge summary about a minor concussion in a drawer at home as a proof, she could see it in his eyes that he was just as much ready for a rerun now. Only his hipbones prevented her from flipping over the rail, and his right hand, more pushing than pulling it was, though. _The fall would surely break my neck. My skull. _

Meekly, she stared at him. Pride glued her lips together.

In the very last minute before her balance tripped, he pulled her back. "Had enough?"

She hated even her own nod, the consent, submissive, in it. For now, yes, she had enough. For now.

He led her down to the parking level. He halted briefly at a black Audi, taking a peak at the interior, the shiny hubcaps, the headlamps; seemingly cursory scrutiny of a passer-by, the glance was though, Lisa could easily tell, that of someone concerned.

"It's yours?"

"Yeah," he shrugged dismissively, and proceeded with the walk-drag towards the back of the garage. "We can't take it. Everyone knows about it."

Lisa chose to ignore the 'we'.

"There's no time to stop by your flat."

"Of course there isn't," she remarked sulkily, whatever it meant, his statement, it surely was bad news.

His smirk told the same. "You either gotta wear my clothes or this one all along."

Now she chose to ignore the 'all along' in the remark and instead went with the outrageous part, and gaped at him. "I rather wear this until it rots off of me than yours. You can't expect me to run around in menswear, anyway."

He let out a humorless, devastating laugh. "I've seen what you wear at home, Leese. You don't seem that picky about it. Kind of disillusioning by the way."

Lisa seethed, glaring at him. The nonchalance wherewith she was reminded of the fact he had been spying on her boiled her blood just as much as the humiliating analysis of a personal detail of her life.

"Relax. When we have time, you can indulge in your shopaholic kick and get what you need," he beeped open a gray Bentley Continental, hauled his luggage onto the back seat. "Right now get in the car."

She frowned, not budging. "Whose car is it?"

"It belongs to a certain Cole Thornton."

"Who's that?"

"A law-abiding citizen, apparently a fan of good cars." He whirled the key around his index finger, looking overly smug, and added: "You're just talking to him."

"Is that your real name?"

He only stared at her, slightly as though she had been talking to him in Chinese.

Ever the persistent, Lisa dared: "Are you really called Jackson Rippner?"

This time it earned her an incredulous eye roll and an impatient jerk of hand toward the car. She lingered by the passenger side door.

"Where do we go? Why do I need to buy clothes? What time frame 'all along' refers to?"

"Get. In."

She hesitated. Looked up to check for security cameras or someone to magically appear in the garage.

Rippner, calmly but deceptively so, inquired with an air of utter arrogance: "Which part of the sentence was not clear enough for you?"

A step closer she took. He did the same on the other side of the car. Lisa gripped the handle. Stood by it, fingering the edge, pulling at it. A hollow tick as the lock clicked open. She was waiting for him to get in. Rippner, obviously, was waiting for the same.

A moment of standstill; sweating out. Eventually, it was Rippner who lost it.

"Lisa, I said get in the fucking car!" He slammed his fist against the roof, startling her. "I really don't have time for this. You run away and I run you over with the car _merrily_."

She opened the door fully and when he bent to sit in, she bolted. By the fourth car away from the Bentley, he caught up with her easily.

"It was lame. You couldn't possibly believe you could escape, right? Or you simply love pushing my buttons?"

Lisa simply laughed in his face defiantly. "I thought I was gonna be run down."

"Is it a complaint?"

"Yeah, please, go back and do it," she spat haughtily. "I won't go anywhere."

Rippner, somewhat exasperated, released her arms.

A clack, as he unclasped his belt. She stared at him, the effortless yank as he pulled it loose. A wolfish grin crept over his features, allusion tinting it. It was obvious what he was referring to: the utmost subjugation a man could master over a woman, sly, disgusting insinuation, especially considering her past; she knew though- due to the lack of time; hence the urgency flexing his muscles-, there was nothing behind the threat – not right now, at least. She let him know with a single glance how low she deemed it; deemed him.

As a reply, he turned her around, forcing her wrists behind her back. His movements far from being gentle, Lisa hissed sharply.

"Ow, sorry, it hurt?" he cooed in her ear.

She could feel the fake pout in his voice, and with a forceful yank he pulled the belt tighter. Lisa pressed her lips together, and bit back a whimper. She wouldn't give him the pleasure he was surely counting on.

"The gift's wrapped," he probed the knot by tugging at it.

She stumbled a bit, and with the continuation of the momentum took a deliberate step backwards, her high-heel boring into his right foot. He let out a half-muffled cry.

"Ow, sorry, it hurt?" high on adrenaline and anger, she mimicked his tone and even his facial expression, and drilled the heel deeper in his flesh. Rippner pushed her against a car. "I'm glad you're having fun. As long as you still can."

He guided her back to the Bentley, shoved her in; Lisa almost recoiled as he leaned across her seat and fastened her seatbelt, fumbling with it deliberately long. She knew he was pretty much conscious of how she hated when someone invaded her personal space- actually, right now it was more like intimate space, she thought as she stared at his sideburn, the five-o'clock shadow on his jaw from a mere half foot-, so she steeled herself, commanding her body to stay motionless. His scent, intrusive and characteristic, utterly male and his, she remembered it all too vividly, almost gagged her.

Rippner straightened and gently shut the door – the gentleness was addressed to the car, not to her. He got in; the engine hummed to life, and soon they were squinting against the mild late October sunshine of Miami. In a few minutes straight lanes of palm trees escorted them along the way as Rippner guided the car through the afternoon traffic of the city.

"Did you kill Keefe?" glaring at him, Lisa pressed her lips together in trembling worry.

"No."

"No fatal injuries either?" She was surprised, even suspicious that he might be lying; forget his lofty moral speech of lies not serving his purposes. Yeah, right, a murderous criminal with ethics, how ridiculous it was. How absurd.

A sigh, he rubbed the skin under his right eye. "No, Lisa. I didn't even try to."

"So what is this all about?"

Dismissively, he reached out and turned on the radio.

Neither of them spoke. Lisa was biding her time till she deemed him ready to answer her questions. The frown between his brows, the steely concentration on his face prevented her from bothering him; there was no way he would answer her now, and she didn't exactly want to rush into another unconsciousness.

When Rippner merged onto Florida Turnpike, she absently remarked:

"Cole Thornton. El Dorado?"

He cast a barely concealed surprised glance at her. "I forgot you were a movie freak."

"I used to watch westerns with my father. He loves-" she stopped abruptly. It was the most surreal thing to do, bizarre thing, talking about her father to him of all people. The same father whose life he had threatened her with not so long ago. Nothing concerning her father was his business. Nothing concerning her, either.

Whether the unfinished sentence was lost on him or he only chose to disregard the change in her mood, he offhandedly shrugged: "Me too. As a kid."

Lisa turned away, keen on not making a comment. If she could, she would have simply erased the previous ten seconds from her memory. She wanted to know nothing, nothing at all about him, no personal details whatsoever. Nothing that differed from what she knew he was. She never even pondered if he too had been a child once; somehow, laughably, it seemed hard to imagine. A papier-mâché villain, it was convenient, without dimension or depth or personality: she wanted to maintain this image, for her sanity maybe or to keep her mental black-and-white shooting range dummy target intact.

To return to a safe topic, she asked: "If you have aliases, why did you use your real name… if it _is_ your real name?"

Rippner shrugged again, and as always, gave an evading answer. Her question was nothing if not transparent anyway. "Sometimes I do."

He used the authoritative tone that indicated he considered the topic exhausted. After all these weeks he still felt ashamed that he'd wanted her, maybe not consciously, to call him on his name- what the hell he was thinking, hoping for-, it was one of the many mistakes he did during that assignment.

The 3 pm news informed them about an attack on the FBI Field Office in Miami and the escape of a criminal.

"According to authorities, he is presumably trying to make an escape on water, thus the security and control at all Florida ports are being doubled and restricted…"

"Good boy," Rippner chimed in with satisfaction. Lisa regarded him curiously, wondering who he was referring to, since the anchor was a woman.

Watching the landscape change, she tried to unravel the events. Of course, the authorities must have been misinformed by a false lead. She was sure the good boy was Rippner's man who had to lure the police as far from Rippner he could. _Wonderful_, she squeezed her eyes shut, suppressing the panic churning her guts. She was on her own again.

For long minutes, nothing but the music from the radio they were both oblivious to could be heard.

Lisa was squirming in her seat, and Rippner knew before she even opened her mouth what she would ask. "Later," he barked, cutting her short in a peremptory manner.

: :

"Could we stop at the next gas station? I need to go."

They had been on the road for endless, silent hours. The sun had just descended behind the horizon, tinting the sky with indigo and neon orange. The clock on the dashboard indicated it was already 6.49 pm. Her arms felt disjoined from her body, the slouched, contorted posture made breathing increasingly difficult and shallow. And she really had to go to the toilet.

"Oh, great. My favorite part. The restroom scene." Rippner's irises blinked in the headlights of an approaching car in the next lane, implying mild disapproval and crude amusement. A memory-tinted smirk grazed his lips. "You're planning something cute again?"

"Yeah. It is called peeing."

He acknowledged it with a half-sniffled snort, and that was all his reaction. Ten minutes later though, he pulled the car unasked into a stop in the parking lot of a gas station.

"I don't have to remind you to behave, right?" Briefly, he touched the waistband of his pants through the polo shirt, and she quickly understood he was concealing a weapon, most probably a knife there. She down-heartedly nodded. He motioned her to turn around and freed her hands without further instructions.

Lisa stumbled out of the car, limbs numb and aching. It felt wonderful to stretch her legs, and obviously Rippner thought the same as he took a few tentatively energetic steps, rotated his shoulders. He looked tense, muscles, senses on the edge, that of a predator ready to jump, fight or escape. Always ready to kill.

Rippner led her to the adjoining building that housed the restrooms while she was massaging her wrists. To her clear dismay, he entered the Ladies' with her. She was patiently waiting while he was checking the four stalls, all empty, searching for possible weapons: except for the toilet brush, nothing had potentiality in that matter; there was only one window right under the ceiling with bars fencing it. Satisfied, he nodded to himself; though there was no real reason to succumb to the idea sullying his mind, no reason other than tormenting her, he submitted to it.

"Alright, go then," gesturing casually toward the farthest stall from the entrance, he remained there, arms folded, next to the hand dryer.

Lisa hesitated, eying him warily. "You… you're not going to stay while…?"

"I guess I will. You know, bad experiences," he sneered. His smirk widened a degree at the sight of her flustered face, and when she didn't budge, he goaded her by adding: "I thought you had to go. So go before your time is up."

Lisa shut the door, and immediately realized she just couldn't do it. Not with him standing a few feet away. It was too… intimate. She could relieve herself anytime with other women, strange women, friends, colleagues, in the restroom but with this man – it was a level of intimacy, maybe even vulnerability in a strange way, she couldn't make herself to step on. He had pried into too many personal details in her life already, this one was too much. She discerned somewhere on the periphery of her consciousness that she was being ridiculous, after all, it was something everyone did, but him eavesdropping on her made her whole being shudder. It was too long time she had been living alone.

Shuffling, steps back and forth, sounded from where he was staying. "Are you having some problem, Leese? Need help?"

Defiantly, she pushed down her slacks and panties, sighing inwardly, she tried to be as quiet as possible. It wasn't without much effort.

Suddenly, there was more shuffling, pattering of soles against tiles, the click of a lock and the telltale sound of someone taking a leak. She stopped in the middle of her act, holding her breath. If someone came in, Rippner had no other choice but to leave, and then she could-

"Don't get all worked up, Leese, it's just me."

"But-?"

"I needed to piss too. Have a problem with that?"

She gulped, trying hard not to attach mental images to that statement. A deep breath in, chasing back the urge to throw up, she finished quickly now, wishing to be over with the whole increasingly embarrassing scene but he was done before her. She exited the stall, knowing all too well a blush had risen to her face and she cursed herself mentally for being so immature, so inhibited. Without a glance at him or the mirror, she washed her hands and turned to leave.

He was gauging her from his previous spot by the entrance. "Wipe off the blood on your neck."

Lisa stared at her reflection. There was a dried, narrow trickle of blood running from under her jawline down to the collarbone; she had long forgotten he had pierced her with a glass splinter back at the FBI what seemed like eons ago.

When they got back to the Bentley, he surprised her by not binding her hands back again. "I hope you appreciate it," he noted tautly, the warning apparent behind it.

: :

An hour and a few feeble attempts later to cajole answers out of Rippner, she informed him with a deliberately annoying and conclusive tone, her only weapon to miff him: "I'm hungry."

"Any other bodily wants I should supply?"

If there was any heinous implications behind his remark, Lisa ignored it. "Yeah. Let me go."

This time it was Rippner who ignored her.

They were already on I-75, heading north, and had already passed the boarder to Georgia. Outside, the night was turning pitch black, and suddenly Lisa felt terribly tired as weariness seeped into her limbs seemingly radiating from the very fact she was shut within the depressingly cramped confines of a car with Rippner.

After some time he made a right turn off the interstate and parked in the line at a McDonald's drive-thru. Ten minutes and they were back on the highway again.

Rippner opened the paper bag with one hand, eyes fixed on the road. As the smell steaming out of it hit his nostrils, he moaned. "I hate junk food."

"So do I," Lisa consented gloomily but dug in nonetheless.

"Except for McFlurry with M&M's. And don't even try to deny it," he waved her off with a plastic fork when she opened her mouth to protest. "But since I don't trust you enough to go to a diner with you, that's the best we can get."

"You make it sound like this whole situation is my fault."

He feigned contemplation. "Actually, now you mention it, it is."

She didn't even comment it.

They ate in silence and half-darkness, gaining light only from the headlights of passing cars and the faint colorful lamps of the dashboard.

Lisa rested her head against the cold glass, trying to dissolve the increasingly painful knot in her stomach by straining her eyes to make out her surroundings in the dark, reading the road-signs and counting cars. Simple acts like that could numb her mind into a state where her body would follow suit.

Rippner was in an awful, almost disturbed silence, she could see his mind working on something relentlessly, his forehead constantly easing in and out of a frown. She refrained from peering at him; the bluish hue cast on his face gave a resemblance to the face in her memories from two months before, and just like then, in the confined plane cabin she could see only the right side of his head, and the similarity of the situation sent a wave of terror through her. She didn't want to remember the anguish she'd had to go through back then. If that was what was waiting for her, she really didn't know if she could endure a rematch. Right now even the mere thought tired her.

"Care to enlighten me already?" she asked harshly, losing patience, tired of his inattentiveness about her. She watched only the reflection of his profile in her window.

For a very long minute, so long that she began to think he wouldn't even answer, he said: "Soon I'll call it a day. When we arrive, I'll brief you if you don't run away. Otherwise I have to resort to violence and we both wouldn't want that," his tone expressed the exact opposite, and underneath the empathic expression she knew he, in a way, very much wanted her to disobey.

Lisa wondered where exactly they were heading but the prospect of getting some information out of him was appealing enough to intermit the questioning.

It was after eleven o'clock when he finally exited the highway again and after a minute's drive, parked the car at a roadside motel. Most of the windows were unlit and only a few cars parked in the adjoining lot. Suddenly, Lisa was dreaded. So far she hadn't imagined how the sleeping arrangement would look like, or if there were any sleeping at all, and now she realized what he had on his mind.

"I won't be staying in the same room with you, Rippner. I'm dead serious."

Her voice, commanding, wavering only with anger, brought the annoyance back to his face. Rippner ceased his activity of fishing for something on the backseat and tossed his head toward her. Giving her a withering, scornful stare, he remarked. "Last time I checked, you didn't have a choice whatsoever. You either come or come. Think you can make the decision?"

"I opt for the third," she insisted without the slightest humor or irony.

Rippner took his time by retrieving the laptop-size bag. "I see the question was beyond your emotion-ruled mind."

He turned, shooting her another belittling look, and with that he provided a perfect surface for her wrath. With a deft swing of her arm, she punched him, aiming at his nose. Only his well-practiced, sharp reflexes saved him from breaking it as he snapped his head to the side, exposing his cheekbone to her. She had a bony fist. He felt the skin snap open under his left eye.

"That was stupid," he grabbed her hair and pulled her head closer to him angrily.

Lisa gritted her teeth, even from the awkward angle fixing the wound gleefully. "Yeah, but felt damn good!"

Rippner let her go, wiped off the blood with an impatient flicker of his hand. "Alright. Listen now, and listen well. If you behave well and do as I say, I will not hurt you in any way and you can take my word for that. Good enough deal? I hope so because that's the best I can offer right now."

Cold gleam of handcuffs, he was dangling them for her to emphasize his words.

"Ripp-!"

He was faster in acting than Lisa in shouting. A forceful shove, a click; she found herself cuffed to the door.

"Now I'm gonna check in. I'll be right back, till then you sit here in silence, understood? Inside, we'll talk."

He opened the door. A cool gush of air rushed in, making Lisa shiver. Rippner grabbed the keys, and looked back with a stern look on his face.

"Don't want me to knock you out again."

Lisa watched him wipe at his face again before disappearing behind the main door to the reception, and peered around to find something she could use either against him or to free herself. On the backseat, the floor, in the narrow space between her and Rippner's seat and the glove-compartment, there was nothing, not even a paperclip for her help.

Rippner was back within five minutes, room key in hand.

Lisa was relieved to discover he booked a twin bedroom for them. It was quite small with only a table and a small TV set apart from the two single beds beyond which she could peek in the tiny bathroom through the half-open door. Rippner threw his luggage on the bed closer to the entrance, checked the room quickly.

"You want some time in the bathroom?" he asked after acknowledging with gratitude the grating in front of the bathroom window.

"No, I'm fine," she shook her head. Right now, there were no bodily needs, only questions rambling in her. Indicating it, she sank on her bed and faced him expectantly.

Rippner took his time with switching on the TV, turning the volume down. Then he followed her suit, and sat on his bed, fingers laced. "It's about finishing the job," he said after a beat, then pausing again, gauging her reaction.

Lisa had already prepared herself for everything he would have to say, the forced command to stay calm effectively immobilized her body; all she did was raising an eyebrow.

"This time it is Keefe who wants to end it. He plans to find the customer who ordered his assassination."

She stared at the angry red wound under his eye, her handiwork. A malicious glee in her eyes as she gloated. "And he wanted to torture it out of you?"

"I don't know the answer, Leese."

"So you vanished," she concluded, not hiding the contempt she felt.

Rippner sighed exaggeratedly, making a show of taking offence by her attitude. "So he let me go."

"What…?" for a heartbeat Lisa thought she misheard him but the self-satisfied smirk on his face was equal to a refutation. "You are crazy if you think-"

"Have you heard about the term 'plea bargain'?" he cut in sarcastically, talking as though she'd been living in a cave for the past decade.

The world seemed to tilt. She blinked, her face flushed as if his words had been a real slap against her cheek, not only a non-physical blow in her stomach. "No, no… it, no…"

"No? You haven't?" mockingly, Rippner was watching her, relishing in her misery and disbelief. "Would have never thought of your hero Keefe that he was willing to make a deal with me of all people?"

"I don't-" she shook her head, swallowed, the inconvenient truth in his words still stuck in her throat, but steeled herself. "Tell me about that deal."

"He sets me free, I deliver him Mr.-slash-Ms. Shadowy Customer, I'm free to go and live happily ever after with the benefit of witness protection. Isn't it just nifty?" behind the singsong voice his tone hid a hint of bitter sarcasm like it wasn't to his liking. "I agreed. I wasn't too keen on spending my best years in a damn Max Security… So much for your heroics, right?" he added, morphing the reborn rage the memories evoked in him into a backlash of condescension.

She ignored him. "Then what was the detonation?"

"Set-up. By Keefe. He made it look like the FBI was attacked by some independent operatives group that had been hired by me to get me out of there. He actually rounded them up and paid them for _not_ making the job. They were just a cover if my Comp-" he swallowed forcefully, jaw clenching as he corrected himself: "my _former_ Company happened to snoop around a bit. Which they, in fact, did. They offered the group twice as much to _accidentally_ kill me in the rescue. Anyway, they didn't have to move a finger, just give their name to the action, take the blame; everything was done by Keefe and a small group of agents he trusts."

"So you are saying they blew themselves up?"

"Yeah, kind of. But that was a fake attack with the minimum possibility for severe injuries. Those were mostly smoke bombs."

"But there is a warrant on you now."

"Of course, there is," Rippner looked annoyed. "Apart from the dozen agents and Keefe, everyone thinks I really fled. So now the whole police and FBI are after me. Not to mention my Company."

"And how do you plan to find the customer if your buddies are out to kill you?"

"Well, you just got straight to the heart of the problem," the twitch of his eyebrow betrayed his frustration. For a long second he contemplated the answer. "Persuasion. I can be very convincing," he commented with grave innuendo.

Lisa didn't miss a beat. "Now can you?" After a deliberate pause: "So what does it have to do with me?"

Rippner only shrugged. "You are an anomaly."

When he didn't appear to be willing to elaborate, she urged him on edgily. "More precisely?"

"I… well, took the liberty to make changes to the plan, so to say."

"By kidnapping me."

"Why, isn't that a harsh expression!"

"Rippner, don't play with me!"

Instead of any kind of answer, he turned up the volume on the TV. It was the midnight news. The video images of the FBI building veiled by smoke and surrounded by a flock of white-blue Crown Vics, Chevrolet Impalas and fire engines; Lisa stared at it and suddenly found it hard to believe just a few hours ago she was there and inside and a participant in the events. It was just as much surreal as entering the lobby of the Lux and finding wreckage in place of the over-polished marble tiles and plush cushions.

"… ambush carried out by a still unidentified group. According to the authorities' assumption, the attack wasn't either coincidence or random, the escape of the captive under interrogation at the FBI office and the strike can very likely be linked together. The police are leading an extended search for Rippner who has been seen in Key Largo and is supposedly trying to escape the state on water. He is said to be dangerous and most probably armed. Should anyone see him, on the screen here is the emergency number the police opened for this case where his appearance should be reported. Rippner was arrested two months ago in connection with…"

As the newscaster went into the details of the attack on the Lux Atlantic, the image of a man flashed on the screen. Lisa gaped at it and for a full minute just searched speechlessly the features of a scruffy looking, bearded stranger. Questioningly, she turned to Rippner who seemed to be somewhat amused and slightly relieved at the developments.

"Is that even you in the picture?"

"I'm not always in good trim," he smirked contentedly but the touch of the smile quickly deformed into a half-tamed snarl. "I was just released from the hospital that day. I didn't quite spend my days there with beautifying myself."

"But… even your own mother wouldn't recognize you here. I don't believe they couldn't find a… more fitting image."

"You still don't understand, do you? Or just don't want to understand. This exactly was their purpose. That no one would recognize me; a vantage point in the chase. Just as Keefe's false lead with the ports."

Lisa dropped onto the bed, not even realizing that at a point she had stood up in utter indignation, and held her face in trembling hands. She needed a week at best to digest it. To believe it, actually. It was, at the very least, a nonsense.

Of the cavalcade of emotions assaulting her, the strongest was betrayal. She had done everything to get this man arrested and now she found herself not only fired by the Lux but annihilated through her vain efforts as though she were the real public enemy. A deal, as if they were bargaining in a bazaar, and someone who should have rotten in prison till eternity had the chance to live like nothing had happened.

Life could be incredibly unfair.


	3. Collateral damage

**A/N:** Thank you, thank you so much for the nice reviews! I'm so happy you seem to like it so far! Big hug to all of you:)  
This one's gonna be another long one, hope you don't mind;)

* * *

**Chapter 3: Collateral damage**

Lisa woke up dead tired; maybe waking up wasn't the best choice of words since she hardly slept all night. Being in the same room with a known terrorist after he had just revealed the most unrealistic plot wasn't a calming bedtime story, and the Statue of Liberty pose she was limited to didn't help the situation either: either that or an awkward fetal pose since Rippner had chained her hand to the headboard of the bed. She hadn't gone down without a fight, and the bone-cracking noise at the impact of her fist against his chin, creating a twin sibling for the wound under his eye had definitely made her feel better about the forced immobility.

With no other option available, though Rippner had snidely offered her a T-shirt that she flatly refused, she'd gone to bed in her slacks and blouse, having courage to take off only her jacket. By the morning, it had been clear instantly, her clothes would look like hell but it was the least of her concerns then.

For what seemed like half the night, she had been waiting for him to fall asleep, and even after she presumed he finally did, she didn't dare let herself follow suit, even with considering the probable reasoning that she would have been long dead if he was planning to kill her (or rather: kill her right then); not that it was anywhere near reassurance. The night was one of the longest she'd ever experienced. Counting his breathing, measuring the length of the intervals between inhalation and exhalation like she used to do it in the times of tropical storms tearing Miami apart, attempting to judge how far the tempest was by counting the seconds between thunder and lightning: it was the same, the longer the intermission stretched in time, the farther the danger- him awake and in his most unpredictable mode- drifted. And on some points along the night, she just wished no breathing in would follow the last breathing out.

The sound of it, the respiration, the occasional tossing and turning, the mere presence of another person was unsettling. In the previous years there hadn't been more than a dozen times that she shared a room with someone, and all those times accounted sleepovers with Cynthia or other friends from college who she trusted; and not to mention, they were all females.

Rippner was up before her, physically at least, and occupied the bathroom while she was lying there, listening to the sound of running water. She had struggled into sitting position by the time he was done, just to appear less vulnerable and ridiculous. Without a word he removed the cuff and she locked herself in the bathroom; there was a waist-height closet in there, she pulled it before the door to block it – the knowledge of Rippner being on the other side of it while she was there undressed almost paralyzed her; not that there was any furniture huge enough to hold him back if he decided to barge in. Since she had no personal items with her, not a change of clothes or shower gel, she was resorted to use the once-white towel and nondescript-scented mini soap the motel provided, and put her wrinkled clothes back on after a quick shower.

Rippner had already packed his things and was waiting impatiently when she exited the bathroom.

With face frozen into a skeptical expression, he looked her over and croaked with unused morning voice. "Do you think you can act civil so we could have a decent breakfast? Otherwise we have to eat junk food again, but then my whole day is shot to hell which is bad news for you."

She was hungry too, and the prospect of making last evening's burgers forgotten was almost thrilling so she consented with an eye roll._ Tantrum boy._

: :

The diner was half-full, buzzing with the silvery clinking of plates and cutlery. They sat in a booth by the window right across the counter, and Lisa breathed in the delicious smell of freshly brewed coffee. With fingers laced together in knuckle-whitening anxiety, she was sitting opposite Rippner, staring everywhere but him. The ordinariness of the situation tipped her world a bit, and sitting here, waiting for breakfast innocently was just simply bizarre. It felt like sitting on a time bomb that could go off any minute.

Rippner examined her for long without the risk of being caught in the act since Lisa was pretty keen on avoiding eye contact with him. She looked haggard but surrounded by a sharp air of vigilance; a canary in its cage, as much watchful of the cat as the opportunity to escape. It was clear she hadn't slept much just as he'd anticipated: she wouldn't let her guard down in his presence, not at night, not anytime actually. He felt glee flooding his chest, knowing he was the reason for the bloodshot eyes, the quivering uncertainty in her movements. Pitiful recompense, but recompense nonetheless.

There was a television on mute over the counter and Rippner fixated it from under knitted brows. Lisa looked back over her shoulder. In the news, behind the anchorman, Rippner's face was plastered on the screen yet again. Lisa's eyes fluttered back at him: his jaw clenched, more prominent than normally, eyes moving along an imaginary line as if reading an invisible instruction about what he should do that only he could see. Suddenly, in the light of the events it seemed reckless, if not chanceless at all, that he was moving around the country so openly.

"I might have to crop my hair," he mumbled to himself. Lisa, with the academic observation of a pathologist, scrutinized his features bit by bit, comparing it to that of the man in the news, trying to see him not through her memories but as a stranger, and shrugged.

"Just tie it back."

He glared at her as if she just delivered an insult. "That'd be sissy." Lisa only rolled her eyes incredulously, not sure if she should laugh or scream.

The mid-aged waitress, Shannon, according to the nametag she was wearing, chose this moment to step to their table. "Hello. What will you have?"

Rippner lifted his head, and Lisa was just as amazed as felt attacked with swells of cold shivers by the fluid transition from resentment to sociability- the latter, she imagined, he had boned up like a subject completely strange to his personality but something useful that he'd forced himself to pick up by watching, examining other people; all the dimples and wrinkles were in the right place, perfectly accomplished by the book-, coursing across his face. Perfectly affable – the only thing that somewhat spoiled the image was the twin bruise on the left side of his face. She usually regarded him through the burnt-in memory of the wheezing brute with the twelve-inch knife he'd morphed into at her father's house, her skin continuously crawling, and anything that seemingly deviated from that image was immediately labeled as deception.

"For me a coffee, please, with crème, no sugar, and… I can't quite decide. What would _you_ have?"

Not 'what would you _recommend'_, no; the slightest bit more personal, more confiding. A smile, open and amiable accompanied the question but, Lisa could detect it, it didn't reach his eyes; his voice was chocolate-like, so smooth and velvety as if he was ordering something wantonly intimate. The waitress' previously bored look turned into a flattered smile. Another by-the-book act, Lisa acknowledged, that wasn't quite unfamiliar to her either: make the other feel how important what they were doing or saying; and not for the first time, it occurred to her how similarly they behaved- she deliberately avoided the use of the word 'manipulate'- towards people.

Shannon tapped the ink-stained notepad with her pen. "I'd take the scrambled eggs with smoked cheese top, they are exquisite."

Rippner shot a brief amused look at Lisa, as if sharing an inside joke that she didn't really find that funny.

"I'm sure they are," he cooed. Again, his voice: a perfectly plucked string, harmonious but so deceptive. At least, Lisa could undoubtedly hear the latter lacing it. "Then I'll have that."

"How many eggs?"

"Make it three."

A contented nod, pursing her lips, Shannon squinted at him. "You're gonna be satisfied."

"I don't doubt that."

Lisa only gaped at them. Were they really flirting? She really didn't know how to catalogue the conversation with the accompanying expressions other than under the label 'awkward'.

The waitress finally turned to her. "And for you?"

She was still awestruck in a horrible way, feeling like an intruder and, not clear why, deeply hurt by the scene unfolding. Rippner answered for her.

"A coffee for her, too, crème, no sugar," he glanced at her satisfied; it was no less than a show-off that he knew precisely how she liked her coffee. Apparently the same way he did. He leaned over the table, eyes fixed on her. "Don't you want to eat the same? You love scrambled eggs."

Defiantly, Lisa glared at him. "I want porridge. With blueberry top, please."

The waitress scribbled it down and left them.

Lisa shot him a withering glare and with so much contempt as she was able to gather, she remarked: "You're disgusting."

"And why am I so?"

"This fake… ugh…" the indignation stuck in her throat like a fishbone.

"Is it disgusting to be nice to people thus making them be nice to you?" Again, pure fleer, whether directed toward her or social behaviors, filtered through his voice and he added a hint of philosophical wisdom to it which just made the whole outcome even more insufferable. "Any bad experiences?"

Lisa hated him that minute, even more than generally, for reminding her without the slightest regret how he'd acted at the airport bar and how he had fooled the flight attendants on the plane. "Being nice to people only if it serves you, that's what you wanted to phrase, right?"

"That's pretty much the same and it doesn't offend anyone now, does it?" That was a question addressed to specifically her, or so she assumed. "And tell me now: would our Shannon associate me with the guy in the news?"

She chose to leave the rhetorical question unanswered and stared out the window till their breakfast arrived. She ate with the increasingly familiar air of disconnection, fiddling with the napkin, her mug and the dry crumbs on the Formica table, arranging them into nonfigurative patterns.

It was strange to see Rippner this way, sleeping, eating like other people. She just realized, in her mind he'd ceased to be a human, somehow while the terror tinting her memories had faded a few degrees, the memories themselves, maybe to preserve the wariness, had multiplied with time; like several layers put upon each other, the image darkened and she unconsciously, instinctively created something terribly inhuman, monstrous, out of him, kneading him into a hateful concentrate. Watching him eat was almost disturbing, like a self-running program, an Excel macro, it tried to re-evaluate her image of him, overwrite parts that were created out of security measures.

Between two forkfuls of egg, Rippner stole a glance at her. During surveillance he'd seen her many times enjoying her breakfast; he knew it was her favorite meal. The accuracy and slight devotedness she would prepare it at the weekends betrayed her, laying the table and taking her time to fish through the refrigerator: three kinds of cheese, toasts, orange marmalade (her mother brought her some from the UK; apparently her favorite was a Tesco brand). While eating, she would read a book or simply turn on the radio. Making the coffee was almost a ritual: she would breathe in the scent escaping the tin can of ground coffee for a few seconds, spoon out a portion, then wait for the water to boil and run through the grounds. Then she would sit, legs pulled up to her chest, and smile. Neither of them would drink coffee to keep them awake, he was sure of that, it went without saying – actually, coffee had no physiological effect on them: they liked it for the bitter taste, for the whole ritual, the scent, the impression that the world seemed to stand still for a moment.

He could almost see it in his mind's eye, those mornings with him in his car and Lisa in her kitchen, cupping the mug, inhaling the steam. Closing her eyes. He would close his before the screen of his laptop. Breathe in the intrusive smell of car air freshener and think of coffee. Think of the empty chair opposite her in the small kitchen. Think of him in it.

In the beginning, he deemed it, the screaming loneliness of the scene- a young woman with a small percolator (those tiny ones, though said to be for two, were rather one-person apparatuses) and one-man portion cold cuts- sad (not pausing for a minute to think of his own life not so different from hers); and then suddenly, it changed into something intimate for him: watching her in these secret moments somehow made him be a part of them, and he felt as though they had connected. Back then he hadn't even realized it was just one of the many flagstones in his self-built road to hell.

Suddenly an unexplainable urge so strong and blunting that it had yet to evoke the incomprehensible fury that usually followed it infested him, and he wanted to see her this way again, in person and up so close but deep down was aware it would never happen, not with him around; those moments were reserved for her only, for her and someone she would trust. Right now the almost private calmness he'd witnessed on the other end of the surveillance camera was replaced by anxious, edgy jerks of her hands. She was eating and drinking like it was something she wanted to get over and done with, an obstacle to overcome, no pleasure. He could see the fear, the dreadful loathing in her eyes that all was his.

As an almost knee-jerk reflex that unexpectedly kicked in as a continuation of those long weeks of tailing her, an irresistible squall of curiosity attacked him: a desire to know which way her life had turned during those months he couldn't watch her, craved for an update he- with surprising honesty and unusual discernment: he had lost these values along the line, he could admit-, had no real reason to. That he had no right either didn't occur to him.

"I assume you didn't know about Keefe's plan, so why were you at the FBI? Another testimony?"

"No," she squirmed unpleasantly, and for a minute Rippner thought she wouldn't elaborate. "Well… they fired me at the hotel."

A mixture of puzzlement and surprise, he gaped at her. "You kidding?"

"Major drop in the income. And reputation, too."

Her shrug was forced, he could tell it, obviously still perplexed that she could fall prey to some figures in the books. She'd been a workaholic, a real stakhanovite (a true value from any employer's point of view), devoted to the hotel and all the tiresome, stupid guests he would have kicked in the nose long before they so much as uttered a word; he had witnessed her handling situations with patience and humbleness exemplary.

"Idiots," Rippner huffed as though he had been fired instead of her. Unable to decide how she should react at his remark, whether it was cynical or real, Lisa settled on fixating the tabletop. "Don't tell me you work for the FBI now."

There was an empty moment of pondering. She lifted her coffee mug, delicate fingers wrapping around it, and from its cover she admitted. "No, I work for Keefe. I'm his new personal assistant."

Hearing this, Rippner laughed, sarcasm apparent in the sound. "No shit. He is one grateful guy."

"It wasn't charity," Lisa's face flushed. It terribly felt like she was trying to convince not only him but herself, too, and this suspicion put its flame even more on her cheeks. "He needed one, the previous is pregnant."

"I didn't say you don't deserve it," he was smirking, eyebrows lifted rudely, teasingly.

Lisa put the cup back on the table with a firm slam. The dregs whirling in the already lukewarm last sips of coffee settled high up in the mug like roaming ants. Her voice snapped venomously when helplessness spoke up from her heart bluntly. "Bite me."

At this, he just laughed again. "Anytime." He was amused. So Lisa Reisert possessed just as much arrogant pride as he did.

"At least I was offered a job. I don't think the same could be said about you."

Rippner glared at her, and Lisa leant back, satisfied with the stab. The air between them seemed to drop several degrees. Rippner downed his coffee, lukewarm, scratchy with grounds. Their waitress came to clear the table and he smiled at her again.

"Thank you for the recommendation. It really was delicious."

He was smooth again. Lisa stood and followed him out. When the door closed behind them, he barked at her: "Get in the car."

The transition again, the split, gaping gap in the sound of his voice between the two sentences sent chills down her spine. It was frightening, unpredictable how he played with his voice, body language (she refused to think that with her mind, too), and Lisa realized she had to be on guard 24/7 beside him. Somehow, because for some reason it felt safer, she could manage when he was crude. The fake smoothness was simply unnerving and a constant reminder how much of a fool she'd been once.

: :

"Make it casual." Rippner's reminder floated after her among the racks of sweatshirts.

Lifting a scornful eyebrow, Lisa quipped. "So won't be attending a ball?"

After an hour drive they had arrived to a mall in Macon, Georgia. Rippner finally granted her the possibility to buy some clothes. Since she wasn't too inclined to interrogate him about the length of time she had to accompany him (he wouldn't answer her anyway), Lisa collected a dozen of socks, shirts and, when she managed to venture farther from him, underwear too, and was now delving through the piles of jeans and linen slacks. After collecting all sorts of casual clothes, most of them consisting of thick sweaters since as she perceived they headed north and the November cold was imminent, she claimed time to try them on. Rippner, who had been incessantly on her heels but at least hadn't rushed her in every second minute, seemed to reach the end of his patience but was generous enough to let her proceed. Not that she was in shopping mood; buying clothes in the company of someone who'd undoubtedly fail at the Rorschach-test wasn't the best scenario she could imagine but it didn't stop her from irritating him any way she could.

Finally, being out of his sight, though his ever dominant presence on the other side of the fitting room door could filter past the lock, even through the wood, was such a relief that for a few minutes she was just sitting on the stool, motionless. Being rid of him made the previous one day seem like she hadn't been able to think, he served as some kind of a block in her thoughts, and all of a sudden she felt better, could breathe again when it got lifted now.

She was in the middle of changing when he knocked. "Lisa, speed it up, will you?"

She was extremely grateful that this particular department store had booths with lockable doors. Just a primitive lock, a cabin hook, actually, but he had to break it off the door if he wanted to reach her. Frozen into hesitant stance, she failed to realize she hadn't answered him.

"Lisa, you're done? Open the door already."

She didn't want to. She was considering staying here till closing. Rippner couldn't do anything without drawing unwanted attention on them. Then her gaze fell on a sign taped on the booth wall warning the customers against theft and informing them about electronic article surveillance. She picked up a sweater and stared at the little devise attached to the fabric: how did it work? If she removed it, would an alarm go off? If so, the security guys would come to fetch her. It was definitely better to get arrested for shoplifting than being the hostage of a terrorist on the loose. Most probably Rippner was thinking the same because suddenly he renewed his persuasion on the other side of the door, voice terribly strained.

"Lisa, open the door. If I have to open it, you will really be sorry…"

Suddenly there was a rustling, a metallic scratch, and the tip of a knife appeared in the slot of the doorframe. With heart in her throat, her hand lashed out and unhooked the lock before he would. The door was pushed in and she casually, bordering on annoyance, looked him over; the knife had disappeared but the look in his eyes was just as sharp.

"I'm done, so?" she crossed her arms before her chest.

Rippner looked to the left, then the right, and in a flash he was in, snapped the door shut behind him, hooked it with a swift move while his hand was already clamped on her mouth. Everything suddenly came back to her with this repetition of an old movement, old scene, with her head knocking against the booth wall. Without her shoes on, he seemed to be towering above her, though Rippner was, by no means, a tall man.

"I'm done, too, with your stupid tricks." He looked around, assessing the booth, the pile of clothes on the floor, the warning sign, too. There was a humorless snicker on his face, gloating, hideous. "Isn't this familiar?"

Despite her will, despite the stubborn, even reckless defiance that composed a frame within her, a skeleton-like structure like that of a building made of metal and concrete, she shuddered beneath his palms. Struggling to breathe around his hand, she fought the memory back, the engulfing, destructive memory along with the fear, the similar claustrophobic feeling that everything was closing in on her, walls, ceiling shrinking, only his presence growing, filling out the uncomfortable confines of the room, restroom, fitting room, strangling her without even the need to touch. Fighting the memory of a moment when she'd glimpsed something uncontrollable in his eyes, behind the cold demeanor; something diabolic lurking in the cover of the front he had displayed up till then – that was the minute when she finally understood who he really was; how serious the situation was. Somehow till then she had deluded herself that he might drop this horrible role and change back to the amiable stranger any minute; that it was hiding behind the terrorist's mask. The truth, the revelation broke her heart and resistance with one single ice-cold blue glint: the man with a charming smile was the mask, and what was staring into her face from mere inches was his real face. She gulped; back then, and now, too, in the present. The mirror duplicated her distress, just like then, and seeing herself in his grip was like a documentation of her incapability to overcome him. Like it was a fact.

But it wasn't, she knew it.

"No message on the mirror this time? You surprise me, Leese."

Lisa just stared at him with open contempt, forearms pressed against his collarbones to keep him farther. _Don't touch me, don't touch me. Don't. Touch. Me_!, she chanted inwardly. She tried to shut down her nerve-endings so she wouldn't feel his hand against her skin, that hand – who knew how many people it had killed. She tried with all her might not to retch.

Rippner leaned close as if knowing his mere proximity could be intimidating and paralyzing enough. She wanted to turn her head so that formidable gaze wouldn't pierce her, so she wouldn't have to look in his face from such a short range and remembering a time of unconcealed threats and scars and feeble attempts to find something humane in the cold depths of this man.

Rippner's voice was tight with tension, and though very low, it still carried a powerful kick of rage. "I thought we agreed yesterday that you would come willingly."

She pried off his fingers, resisting the urge to wipe at her mouth, skin cells screaming in repulsion. "Agreed? Is this your term of agreement? You commanding me around is definitely not equal to agreeing in my dictionary."

"Don't go into semantic disputes, Leese. Another shit like this, another try, and nothing will save you. Don't think I'm doing this out of fun. Do you have any idea how much of self-restraint it takes to spare you? You are a hair's-breadth from me killing you and it takes up most of my energy to let you live. Every time I look at you, all I want is to snap your pretty neck just like that. All this shit I'm in right now is because of you."

And it was true. If he could choose, if he let himself choose, she might be dead by now; every single minute he had to spend with her reminded him of how huge he fell. How shattered he landed.

"Oh, I'm so sorry."

"You will be, if you keep this up. Now we go out, and you behave like a good girl." He looked at her jeans, the price tag hanging from its waist. "Now change back to your own clothes."

Lisa shook his hands off, straightening her shirt and stared at him. Rippner stared back. And didn't budge.

"Would you go out then?" she hissed impatiently.

"No." Crossing his arms he was in control again, of the situation, of his emotions. "You gambled away that right when you failed to open the door. Take it as retaliation."

She glowered at him. Then grabbed a sweater and bound it around her waist. In its cover she changed her pants, feeling his undisguised gaze on her all along.

At the entrance of the fitting room area, the sales clerk frowned at them. "One person at a time in the same booth. That's the rule."

Rippner had the decency- and nerve- to look sheepish as he rubbed the nape of his neck and smirked apologetically, "Yeah, sure. She insisted I'd join her."

"You asshole," Lisa hissed behind him, flushed with anger and embarrassment but he only shrugged contentedly.

Her only share of satisfaction was watching him pay for the clothes but it was sickening too, the thought that she had to wear something he gave her.

In the drug store Lisa was in a hurry; Rippner was breathing down her neck all the time.

"I can't let you buy all the razors they keep in here, now, can I?"

"Those are safety razors! You know, I could kill you with a roll of dental floss."

"That's resourceful. You're improving," he replied with a snide nod.

Cruelly, she quirked an eyebrow at him. "I think jabbing a pen in your throat was equally resourceful."

"Good thing you reminded me to hide all the mundane, innocent objects from this kinky fetish of yours."

He followed her relentlessly to the toiletries, even to the sanitary protection section. With a sinking stomach she remembered, her favorite period of the month was due in a few days. _Great_. It really couldn't get any more inconvenient. Hopefully he had packed some painkillers because she would definitely need them. Would need them twice as much actually, not only for the cramps but for the infinite headache he'd cause too. Fortunately, he proved to be adult enough not to make any comments on the items she put in the cart.

Surreptitiously so he wouldn't see it, she was examining the other customers' movements, trying to make eye contact and convey her distress, at least forcing them remember her by carelessly colliding with their carts. They hardly looked up, and if they did, that was only cursory. Suddenly, with a bloodcurdling realization she understood how unsuspicious they might appear. An impatient man silently praying his girlfriend would finish shopping soon, and with that, end his predicament. At the idea that someone would think they belonged together, her guts quivered. For her it was obvious how vile and cruel Rippner was, it was written all over him and she was puzzled why others couldn't see through the thin layer of fake humanity he displayed. _There was a time when you couldn't see through it either_; the weak but relentless inner voice tossed her in shame and a new gush of hatred for him bubbled up in her soul.

Soon they exited the mall. Rippner loaded her luggage next to his while she climbed in the car.

"You're famous again," he remarked as he sat in and threw a newspaper in her lap.

Unfolding it, she stared at the front-page, the block letters and black-and-white dancing columns of words. _Terrorist kidnaps pervious mark._ Her eyes skimmed over it blindly, landing on the smaller fonts of the subheading. _Is it a go of revenge?_ Lisa shuddered, she very much wanted to know the same.

Then her eyes fell on the images placed among the columns of the article and gaped at them speechlessly. On the first, your average criminal: facial hair somewhere halfway to a scruffy beard, smugly narrowed conspiratorial eyes, unkempt, longer-than-businesslike hair, the collar of what looked like a prison garb. Even those unusually blue eyes were obscured behind a curtain of thick dark hair. This is his true face, Lisa thought, not the amiable yuppie mask he had been wearing on the plane. She had to steal a glance at him to remember how he actually looked like for other people.

Then her gaze swam to the other picture and her heart skipped a beat. It was of her, the exact same one her father kept in his wallet, the JR wallet: the photo Rippner had kept too and was now sitting in a plastic bag in the possession of the Miami Police Department. Incredulously, she examined her own face like it was of a stranger; the picture was almost ten years old. She looked painfully different now and not only because of the years behind her: her face so young and innocent, full of zest and expectations, having no clue or foreboding about the different kinds of ordeal that were in store for her. Who would recognize her in the high school girl with the playful bun, with that winner smile, pride oozing from her right after winning in figure skating in a high school championship? Could she still smile like that at all?

Lisa couldn't believe they weren't able to turn up a newer picture through her father… and all of a sudden, she saw it with Rippner's eyes, through his previous words: _This exactly was their purpose. That no one would recognize me…_

She was nauseated. If what he'd said was true, then the FBI simply let him take her on this unrealistic run from everyone. She couldn't suppress the idea that should anything happen to her, it would be written off as a collateral damage. It hurt terribly that she was, despite all the things she'd gone through, so insignificant in the play of the grown-ups.

She thought of her father, her heart shrinking into a tiny painful ball imagining how worried he had to be that his daughter was in Rippner's clutches again and no one knew anything about their whereabouts. If everything happened according to plan, no one would know it for a long time.

She squeezed her eyes shut and turned away from the driver's seat with stern determination: this time she wasn't willing to risk her own safety for greater good.

: :

"In the laptop bag there has to be a few ID cards somewhere. Bring them out for me."

Rippner had voted against the interstate and now they were driving on a highway in relative silence.

Twisting in her seat, Lisa reached behind her and pulled the bag in her lap. She opened the first front pocket and was taken aback immediately. There was a combat knife in there, a Gerber switchblade, squat and gray-handled, neatly tucked beside a box of cartridge and two magazines. She closed it, shuddering, without intention to look further. In the second pocket the first thing she saw was a considerable stack of Benjamins and fifty dollars, and suddenly she couldn't decide which dreaded her more: the presence of weapons or the money she knew pretty much how dirty it was, how disgusting way it had been earned. Sinking her hand beside it, unable to help but feel the notes staining her skin, her fingertips brushed the edges of a few plastic cards. They were hopelessly stuck in a crumpled paper so she pulled that loose first. Unfolded, smoothed it; the world came to a sudden halt and for a very long minute it seemed unwilling to start again. When it eventually did, it was like waking up to the realization she had been on the receiving end in a hit-and-run accident.

The paper wasn't a random printout. It was a picture.

For a long minute her brain refused to recognize the face: her own face. It was a close-up, only her upper body could be seen: coffee mug in hand, still in her pajamas, she was staring a bit offside, out the window of her flat. With orange numbers, printed in the bottom right corner: 31.07.2005; a day she had no memory of – it was disturbing to see it immortalized now, without her knowledge or permission. Finding it here, in Rippner's bag caught her off-guard. Unnerved, fighting the bile rising in her throat, the almost painful goosebumps appearing on her arms, she tried to still the quiver of her hand.

"What's that?" Rippner asked suddenly, sensing the bewildered, heavy and somewhat accusatory silence. Without a comment because she didn't trust her own voice, Lisa let him see it, that and the anger dwelling in her, too. He glared at the photo, eyelashes flinching slightly. An unnamable shadow clouded his face, his right hand twitched on the steering wheel as if, as a first reaction, he wanted to hide the picture – like it would make her forget what she'd just turned up.

Eventually, a shrug. "Surveillance," he croaked and cleared his throat. "Put that back."

Lisa crumpled it venomously into a small ball of paper and ink and intrusion of privacy. Irritated, she punched the button to the electric windows but before the opening grew wide enough, Rippner tore the picture out of her grip, yanked the bag to his lap and threw the paper ball back in the pocket before fishing out the IDs.

Sharing his attention between the road and skimming through them, he checked his aliases with unseeing eyes. Fake names, fake addresses, fake place and date of birth; he saw only the paper ball, now in safety, deep in the pocket. He knew that photo like the back of his hand. He'd tried to solve it, the glance, like it was crosswords in the daily paper, as if staring at it long enough would enable him to see beyond the pixels. He remembered the moment he took it; the calm Sunday morning, the already thick summer heat and his stubble scratching against his palm as he tried to rub off the drowsiness numbing his brain. Her unfeigned, distant little smile, sad smile and eyes lost in thoughts. That was the first time he could see beyond the dull woman she'd displayed up to then, the people-pleaser mask was peeled off of her face and he recognized something there, on her face, in that single glance, something that told him more than the previous weeks of surveillance had. Something distant, something lonely. And that was the first time, consequently and unfortunately too, when beyond the mark he got to see the flesh and blood human. Everything had gone downward for him afterwards.

"How many of these you've taken?" Lisa asked suddenly, trying to sound strong but failed miserably.

"Some."

Shaking off the tremble, she lapsed into anger. "Some? What does that mean? Five? Ten?"

He wanted to laugh at her, how naïve she could be but bit it back. "Never really counted."

"Rippner!"

"Hundred maybe," he blurted out, gripping the wheel. One more question and he would strike her. He really didn't want to be reminded of that period, let alone talk about it. He stole a glance at her. She had retreated in her seat as far from him as she could so to avoid any accidental touches; in the morning his hand had brushed against her knee as he reached for the gearshift and she'd shrunken away quickly.

In the following silence Lisa slid down deeper in her seat, dumbstruck. "You've taken _hundred_ pictures of me?"

"Or more," he corrected himself snidely. "All with the same boring scenery: hotel, flat, corner café, daddy's house…"

He let it sink in: the implication that he'd seen it all; the contempt was meant to be a cure for his own shame, cool ointment on his wounded ego that Lisa, unbeknownst to her, had stabbed long before they even met at the airport, simply by achieving that he'd shred and abandon his own professionalism in the maelstrom of surveilling her.

"You shouldn't be surprised by that. Surveillance is exactly how you see it in the movies."

Lisa lowered the window by a few more inches, facing the draught hissing through the opening. She inhaled the sharp cold air deeply. Let it bite in her nostrils. Closed her eyes against the sting. A full chapter of her life had been documented in Rippner's sick mind, sick files. She felt horrible, cringed at the mere thought. She'd never ventured to imagine how it really worked when he'd been following her around. For several occasions she'd tried to recollect what possibly she had been doing during those weeks, catching at half-faded memories, moments she hadn't really paid attention to even when they lasted, studying the calendar and methodically recapturing the summer day by day. She hated her apartment, was overly suspicious he had intruded it personally or by surveillance equipments but here the train of thoughts would always skid to an abrupt halt because the mere idea was too disturbing to even ruminate over. It took all her effort not to be embarrassed at her past self whatever activities she might have engaged in – there was no point in it anyway.

: :

"How can Keefe trust that you wouldn't escape?" It came out as an exclamation of hurt, outcry and incomprehension. Lisa hugged herself tightly, suddenly feeling cold. Sometimes the resentful silence disturbed her more than Rippner's scornful remarks.

Beyond the window the straight line of trees of an avenue ran by. They were reaching an inhabited area.

"I wouldn't. Except I want to be on the run for the rest of my life."

"You think they would… _could_ follow you abroad? To a country the US has no extradition treaty with?"

Rippner mused silently for a heartbeat. "I don't say it was impossible. But I don't quite feel like whiling away a lifetime in some secluded country in the Middle-East or Africa. I'm even on that freaking SDN list right now. He sure as hell would keep me there if I vanished. Not that that pathetic list would keep me from eloping if I wanted to."

Lisa shook her head in disbelief. She was sitting in a car with someone whose name appeared on the Specially Designated Nationals list collecting all the coldblooded terrorists and terrorist organizations from around the world; it was nothing if not surreal.

"What if you go back to your company? Under their protection they wouldn't find you."

A long beat of quiet. Lisa looked at him sidelong. The afternoon sun painted deep, contrastive shadows on his face. For a second she was sure he would either shout at her or simply ignore the question. Rippner stared ahead at the buildings of a town he hadn't cared to check its name. Every bridge behind him was in flames and never the cut-off ropes to his past had been so painful.

Lips rigid, features statuelike, he declared gravely. "They wouldn't take me back. They won't."

Lisa frowned. "But then… how are you planning this?"

"They might let me finish the job for them but when it's done, I'm almost sure that would be the end of me, too."

"Finish the job? What job?" she asked with a horrible stone rolling over in her stomach (the prospect of him being killed not concerning her to the least), and forced out the question, past the lump in her throat. "What could you possibly offer to them?"

It came as if it was the simplest thing in the world. He flashed an ugly smile toward her: "I would kill Keefe, of course."

"What?" Her face full of reproval and suspicion. "I guess it's not part of his plans... if those plans exist at all."

"Actually, it is."

"That you would kill him? He plans his own demise?"

Glaring in her doubtful face, a sigh escaped him. "That's bait, Lisa."

"Uh-huh," she uttered without conviction. Everything about him was either fake or fishy. "And what about me?"

He was ready with the answer like he'd been practicing it for long, mulling over the words till they sounded right.

"You're the proof that I am still capable of managing things. I escaped the custody, kidnapped you, ready to kill Keefe." With an air of patronage, he raised an eyebrow. "Sounds good?"

"Okay. What if I say I don't want any of this?"

"You don't have a say in this."

The superiority was natural in his voice, primary, almost subconscious. Maybe he used to address his commands to his dogs, as he called them, this way but she wasn't about to tolerate such tone. Or any of this, for that matter. Turning in her seat, she faced him as much as the belt let her. Rippner shot an annoyed glare at her as if being aware what was to come but she disregarded it.

"I'm not stupid, Rippner. I know you are in a desperate situation. There is nothing in your hand to restrict me, you're on your own in this. If I succeed to escape, there is no retaliation against anyone I love, so the only thing you can threaten me with is my own life."

A muscle she rarely had seen twitched in his jaw but his voice was even. "Not enough?"

"For you, it isn't. Not if I escape."

"Don't think I can't pull some strings just because the Company isn't behind me," he scoffed.

Hell, she really could be naïve, a thickhead sometimes.

"You cannot escape now. It'd show me in poor light like I can't keep you under check." A challenging smile crossed his lips. "Besides, I thought you might want to help Keefe find his man."

"You mean, help _you_ find the man."

"In this case, it's the same."

"It is your task, not mine."

Suddenly, the calm demeanor dissipated, frustration filtered through his words. "Yeah, except it's almost impossible and he has to know it. And who knows, you might come in handy."

"You know, I don't give a damn," she snapped impatiently. "Contact Keefe and tell him I want to be out."

He snapped back sneeringly. "I contact Keefe and convince him I need you. Then he'd ask you to stay, and the Good Samaritan you are, you'd agree."

"He can't expect me to agree, no!"

"After all, he's your boss."

"I don't think it's in my job description."

"We both know, Leese, you cannot say no to someone like him." The derogation filling every syllable was so thick, it boiled her blood instantly. "Your good heart and allegiance are-"

"Alright, stop the car," Lisa cut in. Even above the noise of the engine, the tires against the concrete, her voice snapped loudly.

He only laughed; a cold pluck of vocal chords.

Lisa stared ahead, watching the white lines disappear beside the Bentley. Ten seconds of silence stretched unbearably long for her overstrained anger. If she dared she would have punched him in the head.

They reached an intersection. A teenage girl with a dog was jogging across the road, Rippner slowed down to let them pass. Propelled by the desperate desire for freedom- freedom like that of marionettes, wood pawns on the chessboard-, with a swift unplanned movement Lisa unbuckled her seatbelt, and while the car was still in slow motion, she opened the door and in the head-splitting beeping of the warning signal she jumped out and scurried towards the nearest building.

Treaded paths across the lawn; a public library. At this hour on Saturday, it was already closed.

She heard the Bentley's tires screech to a halt then move against the concrete screamingly as Rippner took a fast turn. She picked up pace, circling the building, dashing towards a narrow passage leading to the back of the library. It occurred to her only belatedly that she should have taken the Gerber with her but she knew it would be over soon. She had no plan to escape, it hardly even constituted an attempt. And if it came to a fight, she was no match for him now. Bolting like this, she wanted him to see she wouldn't let him order her around; or maybe she just wanted to remind herself of that.

Rippner caught up with her in an instant. Lisa didn't have to turn around to know what face he was wearing. The air of rage was vibrating around him, she could feel it press against her back like a magnetic field and his approach made the hair on her neck stand on end.

"What the hell-?" The end of the cry drowned in the pools of fury as he grabbed her shoulder. "Stop getting on my nerves already!"

Using the momentum of his yank, she swirled around and her left arm followed the movement in a large circle, aiming at his head. He wasn't paying attention on the right hand though, and Lisa, a bit awkwardly and less forcefully than she wished to, delivered a blow in his stomach. Rippner doubled over slightly and took a faltering step backward, and she, like a vulture, aimed a strike at the back of his head with her fists clutched together. Her knuckles only grazed his forehead as he ducked.

For the reaction she was unprepared. Pushing the red button to launch a rocket would have similar effect. He pulled himself to his full height and it was like a parachute unfolding, taking the wind captive, stretching its own limits. Lisa, terrified, turned on her heels and bolted.

A low growl from behind, a bit incredulous. "You never give up, right?"

Rippner caught her arm, and as if he was a hammer thrower whirled her around and slammed her into the wall of the library, left arm pressing her just under the collarbone, pushing the air out of her lungs, his right hand, like a flash, reached to his hip and the next minute he was holding a knife to her neck. Only their frantic breaths were quarreling now and eyes fighting a brief war before Lisa's flickered once violently and then focused on something unseen, unreal. Her whole body froze, eyes wide, glazed, dim with memory, lips quivering and frozen in a silent scream of terror.

Rippner was stunned, in his bewilderment almost let her go. Then an old memory chimed in the red fog in his mind, a maddening memory of sunrises and reassured, too early satisfaction, her shaky recollection of a horrible event; touch of pity and compassion passing through him. The stab of a cheap pen. _He held a knife to my throat the whole time._

In the present, he leant close, eyes following the path of the dark green dots in her irises. His eyelids wavered and almost softly, he said: "Now it's better."

With the fingers of his left hand he touched her chin briefly, trying to calm her, convey that he wouldn't slit her throat, not now at least, but didn't want to voice it, didn't want to encourage her to disobey. Maybe it really wasn't such a good idea to take her with him.

He put the knife back in its sheath and released her. As soon as the weapon was out of sight and he turned his back on her, Lisa lunged at him, nails, fists pounding on his shoulders with uncontrolled rage, right now the only dam for the tears craving to gush forth.

"Don't you dare threaten me with a knife again or I swear I'll kill you!"

Rippner spun around, grasped her flailing arms, shook her forcefully. "Stop fighting me then!"

But she was beyond comprehending any words. Rippner could see something had snapped in her, brought out by their earlier exchange of insults, enhanced by his knife. He twirled her around to avoid her blindly kicking legs, pulled her in a vise-like grip from behind and pressed the tirelessly lamming arms to her side.

"Let me go," she wailed, rocking back and forth, pounding her back against his chest as she did so.

He pulled away his head before hers would accidentally connect with his chin.

"Let me go, let me go, let me go-" Lisa chanted almost hysterically; the rage had disappeared, it gave way to the tears now. Her mind was completely blank safe for the simmering concoction of odium and dread; it very much felt like the poisonous brew switched off a lamp inside her and in the engulfing darkness her soul was thrashing around in panic. She had lost control in every aspect: over her emotions, over her life and was forced into something all cells in her body were protesting against. Another change she had no say in.

Rippner watched the symptoms of a mild aftershock with curious detachment for a minute, then squeezed her, snarling in her ear. "Done with the whining yet?"

She let her head fall back, drop against his shoulder, and was rocking in his iron embrace and pretending. Pretending he was someone else, he was her father, her brother, the boy living across the street who used to be her playground friend, the blond jock from high-school with whom she shared her first kiss (though a disgustingly wet one) – anyone but this savage who was continuously in and out of her life, and every time he returned destroyed something there.

Cool wind swept across the lawn, clutching at their thin clothes. Both of them shivered, or only one of them, it was hard to tell, but it resonated through their limbs like voltage. Rippner stared at her exposed neck, the soft line of her jaws, the pulsating vein under her skin, the writhing windpipe, and acknowledged her collected nod with the exhale of the last billows of wrath.

* * *

_**A/N: **Rippner's Wanted!picture was very much inspired by Perrier's bounty, Mr Murphy was supersexy in there (too):P So the pic is halfway between that and 28 days later. If you happened to wonder..._


	4. Crossroads

Here's the next with a little action part which made me realize again that I SUCK at writing action.

Oh, and thank you for your reviews. I hope I'm not too slow-paced for your liking, and not too boring either.

* * *

**Chapter 4: Crossroads**

Lisa couldn't follow where they were heading. Sometimes it seemed completely random which road they would take. Rippner let her study the roadmap he kept in the glove compartment but soon she got tired of checking the signs and roads and towns that she'd never heard about before. Since they weren't barreling down on a boring interstate, the scenery provided some entertainment as it changed.

Rippner had taken the exit from the highway after bypassing a police car beside the road; she was watching his hands with dark curiosity after he'd spotted the Crown Vic – a vice-grip, the tendons and bones projecting whitely, the look on his face was pure concentration as though with sheer will he could divert the unwanted attention. It turned out it was only a State Police car enforcing traffic laws but he chose to continue their journey on side roads, sometimes even dirt roads, only occasionally merging back onto the highway. His attention was shared between the road and the rearview mirror; Lisa guessed he was checking for tails.

Though they didn't speak too much, for which she was almost grateful, it was clear the knife accident had created some kind of a truce between them, fragile, unspoken but very much mutual. Their hostility dropped a few degrees, at least on the outside, but never the alertness. She was expecting a physical restriction from his side any minute, and he was obviously waiting for another escape attempt from her. Even she could not tell why she didn't try it. In the small family restaurant they had visited in a nameless town she surely had chance. Both of them knew if she stood up and cried out who he really was, that would have been the end of it: there was no way he could force her to go with him afterwards. Or actually, there was but not without a dozen of witnesses and bloodshed; and knowing him, he might have carried it through anyway. She could see it in his eyes that he was aware of the mayhem she could cause, and still, he provided her all these opportunities she never took in the end. Maybe it was real trust- she very much doubted it, though- or simply only the display of a nonexistent trust; anyhow, it wasn't the reason for her hesitance. It originated from something else he had thrown in her face that she was still reluctant to accept or even admit.

They had left Georgia and ventured into North Carolina to spend the night in a cabin Rippner only God knew how found or remembered. Lisa's first thought was that he surely was kidding: the cabin was shabby, dark and smelled like stale water. For the latter she got an immediate explanation when opening the tap, only a faint stream of yellow water flowed forth.

The hole serving as a bedroom had no windows, and actually apart from a worn mattress no furniture whatsoever. Since there was nothing Rippner could chain her to, she could have the hideous mattress all to herself, along with the equally hideous room but at least she didn't have to breathe the same air with him this night. Rippner positioned himself outside the door, blocking it with a table.

He'd retrieved two blankets from his car- _Keep them there for occasional picnics, do we?_ Lisa quipped inwardly, deriving crooked humor from the impossible image-, and since the mattress looked like a realm for bedbugs, she grudgingly accepted one. She expected it to reek of him but instead it reeked of gasoline and the typical gut-wrenching stench of cars. Finally, she could change her clothes, and in a pair of new sweatpants and a sweatshirt, wrapped in the blanket, though it was still pretty early, she retreated to her dark hole almost relieved to have some alone time.

Rippner wasn't one to object. He settled down on the ragged couch that was far too short for him and cursed the woman on the other side of the door because he wasn't cut out for this; or rather, he was, more than the man in the street but it didn't stop him from despising his current position. He hadn't been on the run for almost five years, and alone this was a record he could be proud of among his colleagues. And even when he'd been forced to hide, it never happened out of a disastrously botched assignment. Those occasions were mere security arrangements: sometimes he'd had limited time to complete a task and had no time left to cover his own tracks or clean the site, so he simply disappeared out of sight while the Cleaner did his job and made sure no evidence was left behind, or if some was, they wiped the records clean and he could be nonexistent again. It never took more than a few days before he got the message from the Company that the coast was clear again and he was free to move. Of course, he knew the drill, every single detail and thing he needed to preserve himself, all the places, like this shack, that could be considered a snug hideout but it wasn't a lifestyle he would crave for; he would _deserve_, actually. One little slip-up (its embodiment was sleeping in the next room, he thought grimly) – he paid too high a price for it.

: :

In the morning Lisa, still covered in the thick blanket, she staggered out and found Rippner slouched over his laptop and the roadmap, ID cards splattered across the table. They usually, if this adverb could be used for the two days they had been spending in each other's company, didn't bother with exchanging pleasantries, let it be a morning or night greeting, and acknowledged the other's presence with a half-uttered grunt. She picked up the cards one by one, read the names beside his actual attached picture (with short hair, with long hair, with reddish hair, with glasses, with three-day stubble), and wondered if any of these was his real face – if he _had_ a real face at all, one he would normally wear; because the one that reflected his soul, she pondered, was all around the news. Meditating whether how he would pick his names, she entertained herself with coming up with the funniest ones for him from Jack Haas to Kenny Penny and Justin Time; or other suggestions like Balthasar or Gaylord or Bardolph or whatever idiotic name she could think of.

"You're gonna need some IDs. Me too, actually," he said eventually, shutting down the laptop.

The name proposals came to a sudden halt and before they could take a different turn toward girl names in her head, she quirked a sarcastic eyebrow at him, still unwilling to accept the rules, reality of this new life where getting a fake ID appeared as common as buying a toothbrush.

"Okay, is there a Walmart around here?"

"I've already ordered it on Ebay. They offered a discount there."

Lisa stared at him, unsure how to react. Sensing the troubled silence, Rippner looked at her and rolled his eyes.

"Lisa," he groaned, irritated.

"In your twisted reality, everything seems to be possible," she grumbled, picked out a few clothes from her suitcase and retreated to the room.

Soon they were on the road again, crossing the border to Virginia, after a satisfying and much needed breakfast. Lisa felt dirty, clammy and had the constant, irksomely feeling that there was something in her hair- _please, no fleas, please_- and she half expected red spots erupting all over her body. She hoped they would stay in a motel next night so she could take a shower, even if it meant she had to sleep in the same room with him again. The only advantage of the night in the cabin was that the separate rooms granted her some less hectic sleep.

After lunch and well into West Virginia, Rippner pulled over at the side of a road and killed the engine.

"Alright. Our ID guy lives at the end of this dirt road. He's good in this, has the resources, hacked himself into the police database and all that jazz. It's not the first time I turn to him. When we get there, you don't have to say anything."

Lisa eyed him nervously, biting her tongue to hold back the question if she should be worried about this man.

Obviously sensing her anxiety, he added with a noncommittal tone: "He won't dare hurt you. For that, he would have to get by me, and the wimp he is, he wouldn't risk it."

Lisa suppressed a sarcastic snort, wondering if the second half of the remark was a derogatory comment on ID guy or an emblazonment for himself.

"Officially, you're my hostage. I know you love to prove you're not afraid of me but this time try to show as though you were," he said it with such resignation that she could barely stifle a short laugh. He didn't need to know she _was_ afraid of him. Sometimes, at least. Rippner reached in his jeans pocket with a grimace she couldn't quite explain at the moment. "He will search me so you have to take this. Put it somewhere it can't be seen easily, so not a hip pocket. I'll retrieve it on some point when he doesn't see it."

With that, he handed her a switchblade; not the Gerber, a slim Microtech. She could only guess how unlimited his knife collection was: fixed blades, folding knives, bayonets, serrated, single edged, double edged; did he have souvenir knives from various parts of the world, collecting them like people collected refrigerator magnets?

Tentatively, she took it, wrapped her fingers around the handle, stared at it, at him. He gave her a weapon, a knife, willingly, consciously. Rippner sighed a bit theatrically.

"All right, get over and done with it," he urged her tiredly, waiting for the click of the knife. The coldness of it against his neck. The knife had a double edge blade, she'd have an easy job. Just a slash or a stab. She would slash, he decided, stabbing was too manly, too violent. Then he remembered a blue pen wedged in his windpipe, and changed his mind. She would stab. _Him_, she would. Lisa hesitated; thumb on the opener, eyes, wide, calculative, running along his face, down his neck, lingering on the throat, maybe on the scar- the scar with her name over it, the symbol of his failure- he knew was now invisible for her, hidden behind the hem of his hoodie, then sliding across his chest, like a laser beam it drew a burning trail on his skin: she was assessing where the wound should be placed to be fatal; but she didn't move. Another sigh, more impatient this time, he leaned closer, and cupped her chin with two fingers only. "I trust you on this, Lisa. And I need your help."

Lisa stared at him, very much aware that it most probably was one of his mind games. He was constantly manipulating her, softening her into submission. She let him this time but not because of his games but because he had been right before: the level of responsibility in her was higher than it should have been. For another long minute she was giving him a hard, unyielding stare, standing his unusual colored stare in return. Then she pocketed the knife and pulled the sweatshirt over her pants to cover the slight bulge. Rippner nodded with solemn satisfaction; he turned back to the wheel and started the car.

The house they arrived at in a few minutes was a dingy country house on a bald lot. A wooden annex stood in the backyard that seemingly used to be a barn in its better days. A rundown Jeep was parking in front of it, once green, now rusty brown.

The guy who opened the door after the second round of knocking wore khaki cargo pants and a black Yellow Bastard T-shirt. At first sight he looked a bit sturdy but, Lisa scrutinized his face, that might have been fat instead of muscle or hard flesh. Late twenties, mid-thirties, it was hard to decide, greasy, longish hair, a week worth stubble; the stereotype of hackers and IT guys from all around the world. His initial surprise at seeing Rippner soon gave way to mild amusement, bordering slight sarcasm.

"And here comes Lucifer, the dearest; high he rose and deep he fell."

Rippner barked at him. "Cut the crap."

The unwanted attention drifted from Rippner to Lisa and she grimaced under the intrusive gaze. "That's the girl from the news? No disappointment here. Wouldn't kidnap some ugly hag, huh?"

Rippner clutched her elbow a bit possessively for her liking and shot a leveling glare at the other man. "Do you have any more pleasantries to share or will you let us in already?"

The inside of the house was just as much a mess as its surroundings. It smelled of stale pizza and something Lisa could not identify but reeked like wet rug. Rippner manhandled her along the hall – she assumed, to maintain the image of the captor-hostage play, and the other man snickered at her whimpers.

In the main room- in any normal home that would have been the living room but here served as something between a server room and a computer store-, their host, somewhat nervously, turned toward Rippner and stated. "I need to check for weapons first. Not that I don't trust you, it's just…" he trailed off, obviously not planning to finish the sentence but Rippner had the nerve to wait for a passable explanation for a too long second, eyebrow quirked upward, before nodding. He lifted his arms with a disdainful look that Lisa knew all too well. He was thriving on other's discomfort so disgustingly that for a minute Lisa felt sorry for the geek guy, though she was sure he didn't deserve it, if nothing else than for affiliating with the likes of Rippner.

"Don't get too excited," Rippner quipped conceitedly, addressing it to the hands tapping his hip pockets. The reply was a string of half-grunted obscenities.

Lazily, Rippner stared at the ugly yellow face on the shirt before him and suppressed a grin. Though Lisa wasn't aware of it, they had watched Sin City together. It was one of the last screenings of the film; he had followed Lisa to the theatre one afternoon, when she finished at the hotel earlier than usually. She went there on impulse, he could tell it by the way she was checking the list of movies at the cashier for long minutes with the liberty of someone with too much time to themselves and too little possibilities to spend it. He bought a ticket, too; that was also on impulse. Her seat was beside the aisle and he sat, ignoring the seat number on his ticket- the theatre was almost empty anyway-, on the other side of the stairway, a row above hers. The best vantage point he could get. She was watching the movie sunk deep in her seat and he was watching her in the meager, vibrating light the film cast on her face; outside a tropical wind gust rode across Miami, shredding palm trees and power lines, while inside the building he was halfway into shredding his own professionalism and wasn't even aware of it.

Yellow Bastard guy finished searching him, and satisfied and emboldened by the finding, or rather: lack of finding, he turned with a disgusting, very true to the figure on his T-shirt, smirk toward Lisa who immediately discarded her previous pity for him and shrank back with a gagging sound. She couldn't care less if the switchblade got found, what she minded was him mauling her.

"You're the next, sweetie."

She took a step back but he easily cornered her between a cupboard and the wall. Lisa squared her shoulders and drew herself up to her full height which was still kind of ludicrous- _damn sneakers-_ compared to the man's but the look on her face made up for it in a way. His hands reached out, not really in a searching way, or rather, not toward the strategically potential hiding places, and she opened her mouth to shout at him.

From across the room, Rippner, calmly and a bit bored but definitely not less intimidating, raised an eyebrow. "You think I'd just let you feel her up? She's not free to be touched. Especially not for your dirty hands."

A bit taken aback and fortunately frozen, the hands in question stopped a breath away from her shoulders. "Oh, really? And why not?"

Rippner shrugged as if it was evident. Obvious. Natural, unquestionable, even. "Because she's mine."

Outraged, Lisa glared at him; the way he uttered that, with the firmness of a possessive man, angered her. Like he really believed so; like he believed she _could_ belong: to him, to anyone. Right now, though, she wasn't about to object if so she could avoid Yellow Bastard's disgusting touch.

"Of course, no one is to touch your property," YB laughed, and at the sight of Rippner tipping his head in a superior nod, Lisa's teeth ground together.

YB turned to Rippner and rubbed his hands together. "So what do you need? Flight tickets? IDs? Clearing your speeding records?"

"Just IDs. For both of us," and he threw the paper bag he'd been carrying on the table. Lisa watched as YB cursorily skimmed through the stack of money, and she turned away with a repulsed shudder. The whole scene looked like one from a cheap B category mafia movie. The following long minutes didn't quite fall behind in that matter either. Between the preparations of two ID cards, Rippner, when YB's fingers were busy dancing on the keyboard, stealthily motioned to her and took his knife back. Lisa wasn't sure if he planned to threaten the guy with it or was anticipating a vile- an uncharacteristic looking- attack but wasn't too keen on finding it out. After what seemed like an hour of tapping and scanning and hacking and coming up with names that she could never be able to associate herself with and didn't find the process as much funny now as in the morning, with a considerable number of plastic cards in hand, Rippner grabbed her elbow and guided her to the entrance.

YB was only a step behind. "Y'know the Company put a bounty on your head?"

There was only a slight falter in Rippner's step, almost indiscernible but Lisa noted it nonetheless. Outside, he turned back. Beside him, Lisa shivered, both from the cold air and the collected coolness, barely hidden arrogance of his voice. "Hope it's at least 6-digit, otherwise I'd be offended."

YB laughed, Lisa noticed, a bit nervously. The self-sufficient air around Rippner was, if nothing else, off-putting. YB cocked his head to the side, and with a strange intonation halfway from stating to asking, said aloud. "Cartridge?"

Rippner, a bit puzzled, shook his head. "I don't need ammo."

The reply was the most unlikely either of them could think of. "Banshee!"

Rippner, maybe catching the commanding tone in the- in this context senseless- word or simply was blessed with excellent senses, had reacted just a fraction of a second earlier than the strange scraping sound hit Lisa's ears, but even that was too late. He dropped the bag full of the cards while with his right hand, still gripping her elbow, swiped Lisa behind him with an instinctive movement. The next minute, from the dimness of the house, something huge, black and wet rug-scented collided with his chest with a bloodthirsty snarl, and both Rippner and what Lisa identified as a Rottweiler ended up on the ground in a horrible pile of flesh, fur and teeth. On the face of it, the dog weighed almost as much as Rippner. The scream got strangled in her throat and she jumped away on wooden legs, transfixed by the bloody mess of a human arm among the dog's jaws.

Lying in the dust, Rippner was blinded with pain and the lack of air; as they fell, the dog's weight and the hard impact with the ground knocked the air out of his lungs. As a subconscious instinct, he held out his left arm, so to say offered it to the open mouth – always protect the dominant limbs, it was an unwritten advice programmed in their movements with the numberless amount of hours spent with training; though he was ambidextrous, the right arm was still more accurate. It didn't help him too much in the fight, though; as the Rottweiler mauled his arm, the only coherent thought in his pain-flooded mind was a concern whether the latest bite of the teeth pierced a main artery in his arm.

From the other side of the isle of life-and-death struggle, Yellow Bastard smirked at Lisa. "Shall we follow suit? I'd love to roll around like this with you."

He stepped toward her and Lisa bolted. The shock the sudden appearance of the dog had caused started to subside and she immediately recognized she couldn't run to the Bentley as the keys were still in Rippner's pocket. With no better option, she rounded the corner at the end of the house and scurried across the vast backyard that looked like a dump at first sight. Her eyes frantically searched for something among the useless tripe and made a beeline for a rake she spotted farther away. She cried out just as much in pain as in horror when YB tackled her from behind before she could get anywhere near it.

He was heavy and up so close smelled of sweat and dog fur. Lisa bit down on the arm encircling her neck, and he hollered with pain but before she could scramble away, he punched her in the left ear. She froze because the deafening ringing in her head momentarily disoriented her. YB rolled her over but with that he gave her space to claw at his face, and with a badly aimed kick she shoved her knee in his guts, a bit too much to the north from her original target.

Yellow Bastard slapped her in kind. "You feisty little bitch. Are you fighting him too, when he climbs on you? I bet you enjoy that."

Somehow the insinuation enraged her more than his body pressing her to the ground, and she hit him in the left eye before he caught her arms and panted in her face: "Cartridge makes sure he wouldn't climb on you again. Or on anyone, for that matter."

Not wasting energy on useless talk, she steeled her neck and with another poor aiming she attempted a head-butt. Though it was neither well-placed nor powerful, it was enough to make his nose bleed. After freeing her arms, she delivered another punch at his head and pushed him off of her. She reached the rake before he could fully scramble to his feet and hold it up with the head pointing upwards. Eyeing her for a long moment, he let out a roll of laughter.

"Oh, you're turning me on here. You look dangerous with that rake," he teased, face telling the exact opposite.

"You should see her with a field hockey stick."

At the corner of the house, Rippner stood leisurely as though he only happened to drop by. His left sleeve was almost completely shredded and soaked in blood to an extent that it looked red. The right one, from that distance, seemed almost intact and the most conspicuous thing about it was the Microtech he was holding. Lisa wasn't sure if she was relieved or disappointed that he was still alive.

Yellow Bastard, halfway between the armed and assumedly very pissed Rippner and the annex, chose the latter and barreled toward the building that, as Rippner was seeing it, could be housing anything from the ENIAC to a Bazooka. Lisa, still clutching at the rake, cast an expectant gaze at Rippner who took a few steps but they were more of limping and it was obvious he could not catch up.

"You fucker," he snarled, and suddenly stopped. There was an unexpected amused look on his face like he was about to share a private joke. "I'd run in zigzag."

Yellow Bastard was, however, beyond both caring and hearing.

Lisa watched Rippner, horrified, almost seeing it in slow motion as he changed his grip on the knife, shifting his fingers from around the handle to the tip of the blade, his body, wiry and lean like of a feline predator, stretched out. His left hand, limply a bit, pointed at YB's back almost in an accusatory way; his right hand, the shimmering blade, drew an arch in the air and with one swift, horrific and beautiful movement he threw it. Spinning, silver death, blinking, glinting in the light, the blade, like an exotic bird, glided across the yard.

It caught YB in the scruff. He immediately fell like a sack. Rippner, gait still tied by the damaged muscle in his thigh, lazily crossed the twenty yards distance. Lisa regarded him almost in awe, rooted to the spot, and couldn't swallow that part of the mixture of feelings that was responsible for some kind of an enchanted, twisted admiration she was staring at Rippner with. It was nearly like witnessing a hurricane making a landfall – lethal power at the zenith of its supremacy. That movement with its gruesome perfection had forever burnt in her retinas.

Rippner reached the hulking, writhing form of Yellow Bastard with an eerie smile and a kind of amusement as though he was at a fair and just won a stuffed elephant at the shooting gallery. The expression on his face sent chills down Lisa's spine. He bent own, pulled the knife out of YB's neck, sickening sound of metal scratching against bones, grabbed his hair, and Lisa snapped her head to the side so she wouldn't see it, the swift, whip-like movement of Rippner's hand like starting a chainsaw with a forceful pull: the elegant slit across the throat.

From across the yard, Rippner called out to her. "Come back in the house. Bring the rake, too."

She didn't budge. Somewhere on her periphery a motionless body was lying on the ground, in her mind's eye she could see the pool of blood, like a shining pillow, around it. She stared at Rippner, at the mixture of blood- his blood, the dog's, Yellow Bastard's- dripping from his arms and thought: _This is how a murderer looks like_.And she wasn't referring to the blood, the knife, but the indifference, just as frightening, on his face. For someone like him, human life wasn't worth a dime – or rather, it was worth as much as he got paid to take it. Keefe was crazy to let him walk away with it, with everything he'd done.

"Lisa, we don't have all day."

The Rottweiler was lying on its side at the entrance, fur moist with blood, and Lisa turned her face away at the sight of the pink raw flesh on the side of its neck where Rippner's knife must have torn it. The inside of the house seemed colder than a half hour ago and the sounding silence turned her bones into ice. She left the rake in the hallway and followed Rippner to the bathroom.

"Help me find the medicine box," he ordered her, voice strained, as he opened up cupboards, pulled out drawers. Now that the adrenaline was draining from his body, pain returned with full force and the world tipped before his eyes. He felt sick and had to force himself to inhale and exhale with long intervals.

Lisa eventually found the medicine in a chest standing in the hallway. Pills, iodine, bandages; she carried the box back to the bathroom. Rippner, eyes closed, was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, face horribly white, edged with pain. A red drop was running along his left index finger, balanced on his nail, for a moment hung suspended in the air before dripping down: a crimson sunflower on the white tile. His right hand gripped the side of the tub, smearing red smudges on it: that wasn't his blood, right now it presented the physical metaphor for all the lives he'd taken in the past, like it had always been there but became visible only now as though he had just been sprayed with luminol.

"You have to clear the wounds," Lisa said softly, keeping her unease at bay.

Without asking, she helped him out of the sweater. Underneath, the polo shirt, apart from a blur of the size of a palm on his left side, looked almost intact. His blood colored the water red, a wild whirlpool in the basin, and Lisa watched him looming over it like a ghost, like a ship ready to sink. Though his face was carved of stone yet again, she could tell the ache sent him on a spiraling course downward toward total physical impotence.

The cold water slowly pulled him together and when he finally closed the tap, the color started to return to his face.

Eight holes, glimmering with oozing blood, of various depth and size, circled his forearm. She cleaned the skin around them with tincture of iodine, removed the dead tissue, bandaged the arm softly, loosely to keep the wounds sterile without closing them from air. Her heart constructed with sadness at a sudden memory: earlier this year her father had accidentally stepped in a nail during the construction works of the house, and she took him to the doctor, helped him change the bandages several times. The same procedure, a completely different situation. A completely different man.

"You were lucky, no artery was pierced but you might need to see a doctor."

Rippner shook his head. "Nah, I can't do that."

Within a mere minute the bandage got swarmed with red dots around his wrist. Rippner lifted his right hand and Lisa jolted away when unexpectedly he touched her forehead.

"There is a cut there," he informed her evenly. Lisa wiped off the blood carelessly, quickly as if she could wipe off the uneasy feeling she felt at the contact with his fingertips; those fingertips had been stained with a dead man's blood just minutes ago.

A slight smile was tugged in the corner of Rippner's lips; he was thinking back at the scene in the yard, the ever fierce Lisa holding the rake like it was the Excalibur, it amused him. Looking up at him from her place on the floor, she misunderstood the smirk, mistaking it for a snicker at her reaction, at the recoil that would come all too naturally and obligatorily.

She stood up and left him in the bathroom to check if he had other injuries to handle. Rippner finally emerged soon and strolled to the main room. He was collected again, if a bit pale, and the only reminder of the fight was the red patterned gauze around his arm. Lisa helped him pick up various items: first the money, left forgotten on the table, then the laptop with its wires and devices; Rippner tapped something away on the keyboard and closed it with a satisfied expression. They hauled them to the Bentley; on his way he bent down for the ID cards scattered around in the dust and disappeared in the house for one last time.

The tires of the Bentley were coughing dust on the driveway when she saw in the wing mirror the gray puffs of smoke surrounding the front of the house, flapping out the door like an ugly curtain. _This is how tracks are covered up_, she thought grimly. Just a flicker of a match. Something flammable. A flicker of a wrist and a slit with a knife. She didn't feel pity for that man or the dog either; it was she Lisa felt pity for, for finding herself in a world where these, the careless flickers, the match, the dog bites, the knife, were commonplace. In her world she used a match to light candles, didn't have to hide a combat knife in her pocket and Banshee wasn't a command word for dogs to tear someone apart. In her world someone like Jackson Rippner didn't have a place.

But then again, in her world people like him, like _the_ _other man_, kept popping up to destroy it.

: :

The sun crept lower on the sky by the minute, splashing orange hue all over the windshield. Rippner had pulled down the visor and was now slightly squinting against the light. They were on I-64 with Kentucky landscape running along with them outside the window. Lisa- now wrapped in an extra-sweater since Rippner was toying with the A/C in every ten minutes, changing it from hot to freezing cold then back to hot again, depending whether he was tormented by hot flushes or the shivers at the moment- looked over at him. Right now he seemed to be cold and Lisa silently pulled down her zipper, rolled up the sleeves.

"So now every self-appointed Boba Fett in the country is after you? Seems Jabba the Hutt wants you bad."

His eyelids lowered even more, giving a tired edge to his face. "I don't find it that funny. You think they're all like this sorry excuse of a man? He was no bounty hunter. Just a lunatic, thinking himself a born Blade Runner and trying to make profit of the opportunity thrown in his lap."

She just shrugged. It wasn't her problem if there was a hunting season out there with all the money-grubbers trying to make a fortune by scalping him.

Rippner felt offended by the careless movement and wanted to dispirit her just as much as he felt dispirited at the moment.

"It's not the playground, Leese. We're not playing hide-and-seek for fun. You think those guys after me… _us_ are some brainless thugs? Or that they have morals or know mercy? Well, let me break it to you, they're even worse than what you think of me."

"Hard to imagine," she mumbled, gazing out the window.

"Oh," momentarily, he was amused. "So you think I'm the big bad boogieman that crawled out from under the bed to torment you?"

"Well, it quite sums it up."

"Poor Lisa. When it's over I may-"

"_Don't_… even… finish… that!" she snapped, turning vehemently toward him. The expression on her face made him chuckle. He recalled a memory from the plane, a certain memory he remembered only because his remark had slipped from his lips almost against his own will in the frustrated yet amazed emotional state he was in after she'd just played, nearly successfully, a smart trick on him with the disconnected airplane phones.

"So you assume you know what I wanted to say."

A falter in her resoluteness; she crossed her arms before her chest. "Maybe not, but it's better if it stays this way."

"You think I wanted to promise to steal you?" The only answer was the deep, accusatory silence. Rippner pursed his lips in mock sympathy. "I don't want to crush your little innocent world by pointing out that I already have."

She shot him a dark glance, the 'no shit' kind before turned away again.

"I wanted to offer to cover the costs of your therapy. Or you still believe in the almightiness of the Dr. Phil method?"

Lisa met his eyes sullenly. His utter apathy toward anything even remotely concerning any human emotion or weakness had shown its ugly nature already on the plane, and she could remember how offended she felt, how it was like a stab in the heart that he ridiculed her misery that had been shaping her life for years and deforming it into something she worked hard to smooth its edges as best she could; he behaved with an air of superiority as if he was above all kinds of emotional trouble, like feelings were plastic soldiers in the grown-ups' wars. And it turned out that maybe he really was above it all.

She hugged herself, and though the A/C was on full-blast, she quivered at the look on his face. Now, after two months she could finally match a face to the exploratory questions judging her even before getting any answers; _was it your parents' divorce? Did someone break your heart?;_ back then she had been too busy hiding her tears to look at him, hiding the answer she was sure showed on her face. She wanted to spring the question on him if there was anyone who had hurt him, non-physically hurt him but she doubted there was; his condescending behavior pretty much told her that.

With a non-committal, detached voice as if telling him not to wear green, she remarked: "You look like crap." She didn't refer only to his current appearance: the burning spot under each eye, the heavy eyelids and lazy glare; she also referred to the expression she hated so much.

Rippner turned back to the road, and shrugged.

The sun looked like an orange hole in the darkening canvas of the sky. Rippner reached over to the glove compartment and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. Shielding her eyes, Lisa stole a glance at him, for a moment grateful for the dark shades that covered his eyes. But as he cursorily turned his head toward her, she realized how unnerving it actually was that she knew what a laser gaze was hidden behind the lenses, knew, felt it but couldn't see. And couldn't have a check on it whether it was directed at her or only stealthily followed her movements.

Rippner dropped his left arm to his lap. His hands were clammy and there was a headache lurking somewhere in the back of his head. He leant further back in the seat to ease the tension on his shoulders but instantly regretted it. His clothes irritated his skin and he fidgeted at the burning, tight and swollen sensation at the small of his back. The beneficial effect of the painkillers he had taken back at the country house started to wear off and the feeling they let come forth was horrible; like the skin on his left arm couldn't keep his bones in place and they wanted to rip it open and stretch out, burning and metal heavy. Concentrating on driving and directions was increasingly difficult, and he had to admit to himself he needed rest as soon as possible.

"You sure you should drive in this state?"

Despite his undeniable bad shape and because she was too observant to his liking, he blustered at her. "I can drive _blind_!"

Lisa only rolled her eyes. _Men_. "What if it was rabid? What about tetanus?"

"I'm protected against it. And it wasn't rabid," he snapped dismissively, and just to cut short any further remarks, he redirected the flow of the conversation to an offensive course. "If I didn't know you better, I'd think you're worried about me."

"Good thing you do know me better then."

Lisa really didn't care enough to harp on the subject any longer, and let silence reign the car yet again.

By the time they reached the suburbs of Frankfort and pulled over by a roadside motel- it was still early, a few minutes past 7 pm-, fever had put a distant, eerie glimmer in Rippner's eyes.

They could immediately test their new IDs at the check-in and it went without a hitch. The guy at the reception desk was already seemingly halfway out of there, counting back the minutes till his shift end. Lisa could terribly understand the feeling – personal experiences, actually.

In the room, not upscale but twin bed, Lisa let Rippner take the first turn in the bathroom but he didn't trust her enough to keep her unchecked for more than a minute. And he didn't feel enough strength to take a shower anyway; not to mention the '_how_ to take a shower without drenching his bandages' part of the problem. He felt horrible and as he glared in the mirror, he realized he looked exactly in accordance with it. Back in the room, he busied himself with rummaging in his suitcase while Lisa was idling in the bathroom doorway, towels, shower gel and clothes cradled to her chest.

"Shouldn't we take a look at your wounds? Want me to help?"

He glared at her, the seemingly neutral offer had a pitying edge in his ears, and angered that she thought he needed her help, he barked at her. "I'm fine. Go take a bath."

There was no way he would let her think he needed her help, needed any help at all.

In the struggle to keep things under control he forgot to recall the time when she hadn't been in the need of any display of weakness to fight him tooth and nail; and in the fierce protection of his ego he failed to realize that letting her help him at the zenith of his traumatic fever might have a beneficial long-term result he would not gain in any other way. He could not know that the teeth of the dog shred not only his skin but, in her eyes, though without her knowledge or realization at the moment, tore a layer of inhumanity off him. The coldblooded logical part of him thought compassion would bear nothing but pity which would eventually lead her to deem him weak, and in his emotional underdevelopment never once occurred to him that he could bring about the same result by acting the opposite way.

This time, the pitying edge was clear on her face as she turned around and disappeared in the bathroom without further talk. The lock clicked in place, and Rippner sighed. It was just fever. And a few stupid bite marks; there was no way it could knock him out. But as he sank on his bed, a faint rush of defenselessness poured over him. He leant back on the pillow and closed his eyes. They burnt a hole in his eyelids, or so it felt.

Lisa took her time in pampering herself. The simple fact that she could finally have a long shower was a heavenly feeling; as if with the water she could rub off the events of the past three days. She washed her hair and the familiar scent of the shampoo soothed her even more. She'd refused to buy pajamas, considering them too intimate to be worn in the same room with Rippner, so she opted for sweatpants and a big, loose-fitting T-shirt with Batman on it - an item from the men's department of the store in Macon.

When she finally emerged with thick vapor swirling around her like stream-wings, the room was silent. The lamp on the nightstand between the two beds was on, casting long deep shadows on the walls. Rippner was sleeping on his bed, with his left arm nursed by laying it across his abdomen. He seemed to have drifted off against his intention, judging by his left foot placed on the floor as if he planned to stand up any minute.

She couldn't quite explain why she cared but she stepped to the closet anyway and retrieved a blanket to throw it over him as in his impromptu falling asleep he had lain on his. She halted there, beside the bed and frozen into a statue of hesitance, stared down at him. Suddenly an old memory emerged in her mind and she recalled the Jackson Memorial, the glance she'd stolen through the window to the ward: Rippner in the hospital bed, white as the linens beneath him. And another memory: on the floor at her father's house, shrieking sirens in the background, strength, anger and for a horrible minute she feared life, too, leaking from the weapon-stricken holes in his body. He looked the same now. Below the unhealthy blush on his cheekbones, his skin was fair, paler than usually, crispy, almost parchment-like with a dull sheen of sick perspiration. Obviously, he had a high temperature.

Involuntarily, unconsciously even, she leaned forward as if to see him better in the dim light – she dared now, watching him openly, now that she was sure he wouldn't catch her staring. A murderer with freckles and girlishly long eyelashes. Lisa shook her head almost in a disapproving manner. His stubble was auburn against his skin and her eyes travelled down on his neck, past the round, raw pink scar that was visible now above the hem of his clothes, and lingered on the rare, ginger hair at the V-neck of his shirt. He was wearing a golf shirt under a zip-up hoodie, jeans and sneakers, and he looked like your average guy-next-door: normal, simple. It was frightening because no one would have told that under the cotton and wool and stripes, under the freckles and fair skin, there buzzed a lethal, horribly efficient power, both mental and physical, the very capability to destroy. Its dreadfulness shook Lisa out of her reverie. As she draped the blanket over him, something caught her eyes: beside him on the sheets, the handcuff was glinting in the light.

Somehow it served as a wake-up slap. She backed to her own bed, sank onto it.

Rippner was sleeping. Her bag was unpacked. She knew where he kept the money. Even that she wouldn't need, just a question to the receptionist. A question where the police were.

Or, ironically, all it would take was a phone call.


	5. A deal with the devil

**A/N: **Okay, here is the next one, definitely with less adventure.  
Thank you again for the reviews, I enjoy every one of them; the guessing and little interpretations like yours, Lillese! Thanks, too, for stating that my English isn't that crappy XD And thanks too, for taking your time and review the story.

* * *

**Chapter 5: ****A deal with the devil**

"I'll be home soon. Just don't worry about me, I'm fine. And before you ask, yes, I'm sure," Lisa chuckled. Her fingers could easily be part of the receiver with the force she was clutching it, they almost melted into the hard plastic. Blinking rapidly, she fought back the tears gathering on the periphery of her feigned strength, threatening to wash it away. She inhaled, and with voice caught in her throat, she meant to say it airily but it came out strangled, she added: "I love you, Dad."

She paused, squeezed her eyes shut, unwilling to detach the phone from her ear. Putting it back on the cradle was a struggle in itself. For long minutes she just stared at the indifferent dial, trying to find solace in the consistency of the numbers; she repeated them over and over, going from zero to nine and to zero again. Sometimes the right thing to do looked the most obscure. And unfortunately, the most doubtful, too, so there was no way she could easily tell which of the many choices was the less destructive one.

Lisa lumbered out of the post office, back in the mild sunshine. Squinted against the light, and smiled. She was free, and it gave her strength that whatever she would choose, no one else had a say in it.

: :

The pounding was rhythmical, the ache blossomed and folded with every heartbeat, growing larger, more vivid by the minute, and he couldn't ignore it any longer. It crept, the petals of pain, from his fingertips to his elbow, echoed in his temples dully, forcing him to remember. The dog, the bites. Rippner opened his eyes to a dim room. The blue-yellow striped curtains haphazardly blocked the light out and he sighed, right now grateful even for such a small gift as semi-darkness and silence. That, the silence, made him remember other things too.

He turned his head to the side, tendons screaming in defiance and he groaned, both from the pain and from what he saw. What he wasn't seeing, actually.

"Lisa?" he sat up gingerly.

The other bed was empty. Beyond it the bathroom door ajar, dimness reigning behind it. At him calling her name again nothing replied, nothing but quiet. She was gone. Of course, everyone in her place would be.

There was a feeling in the pit of his stomach, a sinking feeling, a numb, quivering feeling he chose not to examine further. That was a forbidden territory; his personal Area 51.

His expert eyes measured the room, the various objects, the chair pushed under the table. Apparently she'd been in hurry, she had left without her luggage. Detached, he nodded approvingly: she was right, the bag would just slow her down.

He was sitting on something hard, and as he fished for it in the mess of sheets and clothes, a huge surge of shame assaulted him at the sight of the handcuff. Damn fever had sucked out the last bits of strength from him, dried up his vigilance and, like some kid with flu, he had fallen asleep just that easily. In his line of work such indulgence could cost one's life.

And suddenly, he started.

Holding his breath, he listened. To birds outside, car tires, someone shouting something he couldn't make out; through the curtain he couldn't see shadows lurking around to ambush him but it didn't mean much.

Hope filtered in his mind warily. Maybe she hadn't called the police.

At this very thought a fumbling at the door startled him, rendering him motionless. Well, maybe she had.

The door opened quietly, and his breathing stopped short, along with his heart, his mind that could not process the vision of Lisa stepping in with a plastic bag in hand. She, too, stopped short, and there was something unspeakable passing between them, too huge to be compressed into as trifling as words could be. He had answers to questions he should have asked in the first place, and she had questions she was sure had no fitting answers. She didn't want him to misjudge her actions, but he wasn't about to do so. Right then, Rippner was fighting the urge to jump up and yell at her for wandering around without his consent, but that would have led nowhere.

"You're up?" Lisa stated the obvious quietly, and ignored the gathering darkness in his eyes that not even he was aware of at the moment.

Gently, she pushed the door close. The click of the lock sounded menacingly loud and it transformed into a metaphor: she sensed, with that physical move, she irrevocably concluded something. Shuffling to the table, placing the bag on it happened with the accompanying air of loss, she couldn't help but compare it to walking in a lion's lair.

She fumbled with the bag, the box inside. "I brought you soup. There's a small restaurant down the road."

"Soup for breakfast?"

"Breakfast?" Lisa chuckled, looking over at him. Still pale but he looked definitely less gaunt. "It's eleven o'clock, Rippner."

"What?" His head snapped toward the clock, and both from the sudden movement and the sight of the digital red numbers confirming her words he held his head in his palm till the world settled back in its normal pace.

From the table she picked up the bottle and shook it. "Pills?"

He refused to start the day with painkillers though now that the initial shock of her reappearance was wearing off, the aching in his arm signaled its presence again. Cautiously, he stood up, noting that he was still in his sneakers. He wobbled to the foot of the bed and casually remarked.

"I thought you'd left."

"I bet you did. Judging by your face when I entered," she said. What she didn't say was that how close she'd been to running away.

Though he guessed he knew the answer, he asked it anyway. The suspicion was apparent in his gaze, intense as ever, darkening a few degrees and daring her to lie. "Why?"

"It has nothing to do with you. I do it for Keefe." She stared at him sternly as if it was his fault that she really couldn't say no, and steeled herself for the smug remark that he'd told her so. It never came though.

Instead, nodding to himself, Rippner strolled over to the window, looked out at the parking lot, the street in front of the motel. For a long minute he was examining the scene, the people, the cars driving by. Nothing seemed out of place.

Behind him Lisa, watching tautness solidifying his muscles, scoffed at his back, at the sunlit side of his jaw, his earlobe. "You think I called the police? You think if I did, I'd be still here?"

He moved his head to the side a bit but didn't turn around. She could see the hint of a wiry smile across his lips, the pondering stillness in the fingers curling into the curtain.

No, she didn't call the police but there was no need for him to know she did make a phone call, a very harmless one: she had called her own apartment and left a message on the answering machine for her father. It was Monday, and the removal company was scheduled for two days later to transfer her belongings to Washington – though it was very probable that the whole removal was cancelled now. Anyhow, she hoped her father would go over to her apartment, and there was a slight chance, seeing the blinking light on the machine, he would listen to the message. She could have called him at home but she'd opted against it, not so out of precaution and fear that the police might be monitoring her father's calls but more out of certainty that she would be unable to argue her points for staying without deepening his despair and planting the suspicion and worry in him about her mental state – she as well very much questioned it. But he had to know she was still alive and as fine as the circumstances let her.

"Go and eat your soup before it goes cold," she prodded him, suddenly tired of it all: of him making it even more difficult, of her exposing herself to such situation willingly.

Rippner gave no reaction, apart from facing her slowly, calmly. He, again, wore the dictionary meaning of blank look; Lisa briefly wondered if there was anyone in this world who would willingly play poker with him – he could beat Michelangelo's David in the stone-face contest easily. It was upsetting, annoying and she couldn't get used to it: the shade of his eyes, cerulean and eerily bright, the way he could play with it, darkening it, letting it cloud or light up but always closing it up before she could try to peek behind the layers of shields constructed in the span of many years. Sometimes, they were the eyes of a dead man.

Rippner was gauging her, gauging the situation, the pleasing outcome of the lack of favors exchanged, her new place in the unwritten contract between them. He recognized his own methods, the manipulation behind her acts, how she was trying to coerce a new position for negotiation for her. Maybe it wasn't exchange of favors but certainly an exchange of trust on a very low, very precarious level.

She was late though, and, the best thing (his doing in its perfection), she didn't even recognize it. For some time now, he, when his temper wouldn't get in the way, had been handling her cautiously, giving her as much space and- false- sense of freedom as he deemed to be safe and manageable. He had learnt from his mistakes, knowing full well what she was capable of under pressure or when she felt threatened: the more he pressed, pushed, forged her, unlike iron, the less willing she was to bend and yield and be molded. But he had to be careful, keeping the best proportion of right granted and denied: with too much liberty she might tend to feel encouraged to go on her own agenda.

And the proof that his tactics worked- though in all honesty, he was mildly nonplussed- was the most gainful, the most pleasing one: she came back and she did so with the certainty that it was of her own volition and didn't suspect that he had coaxed her into returning. A few of her barriers were down, and the brilliance, the perfection in the way he'd carried it out was the cruelest: she didn't realize it was she who brought them down.

The moment was almost delicious for him.

That's how well he knew her. He'd had time for the thorough analysis: in the idle, morphine-hazed hours of his hospitalization, while the doctors were patching his body with stitches, machines and medicine, mentally he pulled himself apart, and to find answers, admit facts about where it all had gone wrong he pulled her apart too, because there was no answer for him without her; and then put them back together again. The painkillers smoothed the edges of his failure and with that, suppressed the remnants of anger that clung to it, providing a relaxed state for his psyche, perfect for the cold scrutiny of himself.

"Can I take it as an affirmation that you stay now?"

Lisa frowned. Did he really expect her to verbally prove she was willing to lay her head on the block?

"Yeah," she mumbled finally.

Contented, Rippner settled at the table, and suddenly realizing his hunger, he dug in.

With some trouble he took a shower afterwards, shaved and changed his clothes. Fever was still lurking in his veins like snake poison, ready to take over. He felt it tug at the edges of his consciousness, clear thinking. When he finished, Lisa had already prepared the medicine bag.

"I'll change your bandages."

Unrolling the damp gauze around his arm, Rippner scoffed at her. "No, I can manage."

"Don't be a kid," she shot him a glare, and he shot her his version of hard look in return. "Okay, then be, for all I care."

Finally, the bandages, the immobility of his left arm, the oozing, swollen and red wounds constituted a hitch in the process, and, teeth-gritting, stone-faced, despising himself and her, too, Rippner had to let her help.

"You know it's just a breath away from stitching. If not beyond."

He, too, examined the holes on the side of his wrist with detached curiosity as though it wasn't the part of his body but a strange tropical animal. "Yeah, it's deep. Probably I should do it eventually."

She snapped her eyes to his. "The stitches? You?"

"Wouldn't be the first time," he twisted his right arm, so she could take a look at a zigzag white scar beside his elbow, obscured by ginger hair.

"Looks like a butcher's doing."

"I'm not completely incapable but not as deft with my left hand as with the right."

Lisa cut off a half span long medical tape and shook her head. "It's crazy."

Calmly as if stitching his own wounds was the most natural thing, Rippner shrugged. Lisa had a faint guess it really was for him.

"There are things you learn to live without in my line of work; things that you take for granted now. Like taking care of your wounds without proper medical help; provided you're not able to reach any of the doctors in contract with the Company."

The fact that they had no-questions-asked doctors available across the world didn't even surprise her. Nudging him to turn his arm for a better access for the gauze she wanted to apply, she asked. "And?"

"And what?

"What other things you have to give up?"

Her eyes were fixed on the crust of a shallow injury but she could sense the grin in his voice. "Why? Considering a job change? You'd make a horrible manager."

"I take it as a compliment, so thanks," Lisa huffed, and slapped away his hand when he tried to help her with the bandage. "So what is it you have to sacrifice for this lofty, socially respectable job of yours?"

There was a silence, not really uncomfortable, more like a contemplating kind Lisa seemed oblivious to. Rippner was eying her for long, the absent touches of her fingers completely immersed in the activity and her own thoughts, and tried to guess why she was asking it.

In fact, her inquiry puzzled her just as much as him; the almost morbid curiosity, in a way, was as twisted as disaster tourism: she observed the gruesome wreckage, the damaged good she deemed his life, with a standoffish air. Her intention to understand why someone would choose a work like this became laughable when after the momentary insanity vanished she realized there was no way she would ever find any reasoning good enough. From the corner of her eyes she peeked at him, noticing his collected, deep scrutiny – the flash of intense blue as the light hit his eyes unnerved her. The words she wanted to take back her question with shoved their way forward but were petrified there, and he beat her at it by giving an answer.

"The main difference is in the lifestyle. Everyday life, actually. There is no regularity in it, not that it's a con. In most cases it's not. No boring routines, no cycles of habits you might stick in without even realizing it."

He paused, sending her a pointed look which she deliberately disregarded. Her hair fell across her cheek, conveniently curtaining her off from his gaze; and he was grateful his hands were occupied, otherwise he was afraid that with an instinctive movement, he would have brushed it away just to see her reaction, the recognition in her eyes that he was dissecting her again. And the hurt, too; that especially. She was now depriving him of that pleasure.

"People are slaves of their own habits without being aware of them. They find calmness, safety in its familiarity, in the never-ending circle they are running in, or they're simply too lazy or ignorant to change it – it's their self-built cage. That's why it is so easy and so boring to tail them. They take the same route to work and back home, park the car on the same spot, meet people at the same places, order the same things."

Lisa couldn't help a notch too forceful yank she applied to the bandage, reveling in the way his arm twitched from the sudden pain. Every word landed like a well-placed insinuation, a malicious criticism of her life. She really wished he would shut up already without her commanding him and thus revealing how she hated this topic, but Rippner went on regardless.

"Habits vary with people, and some have more, some less but all of them have this unconscious pattern they follow, and through the repetitive activity you might even be able to take a guess at their personality, how they would react in certain situations."

Again, his speech sounded like he didn't consider himself part of the human race. Her temper perked; with that haughtiness he could be easily mistaken for someone examining laboratory rats.

"So by stalking me you could guess I'd kick your ass?"

This time she ceased her activity and met his stern gaze without flinching. The somewhat civil but not effortlessly obtained attitude between them dropped like a torn curtain, revealing the tension lurking behind it. His words cut through her like a knife; just like hers had cut through him, though she, of course, couldn't be aware of it.

"Watching you made me believe you didn't have a personality whatsoever."

"Well, it tells a lot about your extraordinary skills. You got beaten by someone without personality."

"No, it tells a lot about you being a maniac of a liar in every aspect of your so-called life."

Ever the tactical, before she could retort and it would escalate into another snarl-contest, Rippner went on with the topic as if the little dropped-in insults never happened. The airy negligence he handled the situation with narrowed her eyes, and Lisa abandoned the bandages completely, leaving him there to finish swathing his arm on his own. Rippner was in no mood of fighting her right now, not with the ache all over his body; and the truce between them was still too fragile to risk with a pointless quarrel.

"So back to the question: in this work you eat when you have time, you sleep when, where and how long you can. You learn to sleep sitting in a car, on a plane, on the floor, at night, in daylight, only a few hours or only in every second day. And you don't even feel it's inconvenient because, the wonderful thing is, humans can get used to irregularity just as much as to regularity."

Still a bit gruffly, she remarked. "Now it makes sense."

"What?"

"The dark circles under your eyes. Back then, I mean. I was thinking this guy had just walked out of a day-long boring business meeting."

He didn't comment it. With a clumsily cut tape he secured the last gauze around his wrist. Funny how she had noticed what those who knew him, saw him on a more regular basis had failed to; actually, even he failed to. During that assignment he not only slept little- in fact, he had developed a mild case of insomnia- but even lost weight. Something had slowly evaporated through his pores, escaping him in the endless hours in front of her apartment.

Out loud, he said. "Yeah, I was bored to tears."

"Sure. It must have been crucial to check if I was sleeping all night or happened to make scrambled eggs at 3 am, right?"

Her gaze was penetrating and leveling, full of accusation that he had pried into her life without permission and still had the nerve to comment on it like it was a personal offence toward _him_ that she was leading an eventless life – as if her life was a movie he had bought ticket for and had to leave the theatre in utter boredom, feeling cheated out of his money. That minute she hated him so much; for being brusque or being right in a way about the facts, she wasn't sure.

"You learn to value the little details in this business," Rippner wised her up arrogantly, and abruptly stood. Preoccupied himself with packing the medicine, suddenly short of a snide enough retort. Better seemingly lose a battle than letting her dwell on about the surveillance his ego was still more than uncomfortable with. There was no need for her to realize- and with her blindly aimed insults and never-ending, more and more spot-on questions she was already getting terribly close- that he had gone beyond a line where it was still necessary to check on her daily routines. He knew what liquid detergent brand she would use for her clothes, for crying out loud – where the hell was that professionally necessary?

"I want to talk to Keefe," Lisa claimed suddenly.

Annoyed, he turned to her but hid his temper behind a feigned sympathizing expression. "I'm not in direct contact with him, Leese."

She froze, suddenly alarmed. Her fingers clutched at the sheets. "But you said…" she frowned, and he cut in.

"I never said I was. You assumed it. But if you want to talk to Alvarez, fine with me. You know Alvarez, right?"

After a stunned moment while she was searching for a face in her memory to match with the name, she nodded, then shook her head, indicating she didn't intend to talk with the FBI agent. Keefe's voice she would recognize. The certain Alvarez Rippner would put her through could be anyone; Rippner's man or Alvarez himself. And apart from the testimony she had given to him, there had been no contact between them; she needed someone closer to her, someone she trusted on a certain level – though, frankly, Keefe was rapidly losing it.

"How could he let it happen?" she murmured almost to herself and was jolted out of her thoughts at the sound of Rippner's snort.

"He's been planning it ever since I was released from the hospital. Or even earlier. What did you think? The solitary confinement was meant to protect _me_, not the others from me; I had my own, thoroughly monitored guards in front of the door, own food served to avoid being poisoned. Accept it, Leese, everything has a price in this world. And Keefe's just as much aware of it as everyone besides you."

The disdain on her face could be copied from a lexicon, it was exemplary. He was bathing in it with twisted glee like it was something to cherish.

To be honest, though being idealistic had never been a term he could be accused with, he was somewhat surprised when Keefe had offered him the deal. Of course, as it turned out, he wasn't better than the average politician, ready to do anything to reach his goal, even if it meant to make a pact with the man once paid to wipe him out along with his family. _The irreproachable Secretary against terrorism, my ass._

It was real pleasure to break it to Lisa, to see her admiration for Keefe falter. He couldn't understand why it irked him that she was so devoted to him. Maybe it was her naiveté, which quality, along with stupidity, always irritated him to no end. Not that he minded the existence of naive or stupid people: they were the means in his line of work, making his job easier – as the top carnivore in the system, he was ready to swoop down on them; he was specialized in recognizing and controlling them, guiding them to directions that suited his purpose. The problem was that Lisa turned out to be no fluffy bunny somewhere at the bottom of the food chain as he had first so wrongly and fatally assumed. Not a top consumer either but definitely something to reckon with, capable of anything against an imminent threat (he had seen amiable, harmless-looking hedgehogs bite off heads of snakes because they had crept too close for their liking: no matter how the reptiles, poison-fanged, vile, were tossing and turning to get free; slow chewing and rolling into living nail-balls and some more chewing and rolling until it was over); and still, she was so gullible on a certain level. Not towards him, of course, not anymore.

"It's just unbelievable that they would let you run around without any check on you. It's unreasonable and blatant irresponsibility."

Rippner regarded her with a faint aura of appreciation. Sometimes she could elicit involuntary confessions simply by numbing his mind with the flood of questions and assumptions. This time he gave it willingly if it meant she would thrash about mentally a bit less.

"If it makes you feel any better, they know where we are. Alvarez gave me a tracking device. I put it on the undercarriage of the Bentley if you want to check it."

"Oh," was all she said but very much looked like she wanted to run out and peek under the car.

: :

With a bashful turn of her head toward the storefront and the street beyond it, still uncomfortable with the thought that, all things considered, they looked like any normal couple would, Lisa waited seemingly patiently as the waiter served their plates. Outside the sunset still wrapped the roofs in orange glow but the streetlamps were already on. A miniscule Joker hopped down the sidewalk hand in hand with a little boy with a sack over his head. _Batman villains_, Lisa blinked; she had completely forgotten it was Halloween evening. Instead of carving pumpkins at home for her own entertainment and watching Nightmare before Christmas for the hundredth time, she was having her share of monster party with a real-life ghoul dressed in slacks and sports coat.

The restaurant was in the downtown of Frankfort, in a charming pedestrian zone, just off a main road and its honking, tire-screeching traffic. The early evening crowd started to file in for a coffee or the homemade Bourbon balls the place seemed famous for. Lisa had persuaded Rippner to stay another night in the town. He looked still quite worn, anyway, to drive another 10+ hours but of course she didn't voice her opinion and he would have never admitted he needed that extra day for rest.

In the hope that she would get rid of his company and finally move her limbs after days of constantly sitting in a car, Lisa had insisted on taking a walk around the city. Obviously, Rippner didn't trust her enough to let her wander around without supervision for too long time, but rubbernecking, as he put it, was the last he wanted to engage in. After mutually digging their heels in, in the end she had left him in the car parking at curbside, making an offhand comment that he could stay in there and tail her since he was used to it anyway. That had made him abandon the Bentley, too.

The air was crisp, softened by the mild sunshine: perfect time for a walk. While Lisa was wandering around, Rippner was sauntering behind her in a comfortable distance or sat on a bench in a public park while she was visiting churches- she had joked inwardly that in a church she could feel secure since he wouldn't risk come in and have the building collapse on him-, the Capitol building or the nice little streets lined up with two-storey buildings; decorative crown moldings and stucco frames adorned the colorful façades. Comparing it to Miami, it had a completely polar atmosphere that she found almost tale-like as if strolling around in a life-sized dollhouse city. The nice tourist route, the strange yet interesting scenery soothed her nerves, and for the first time in days Lisa could almost forget that technically she was a hostage.

She had planned to sneak in a buffet and grab something she could eat underway so to evade the situation where she had to sit at the same table with him again, but Rippner either discovered what she was up to or simply got hungry: assertively, he had caught up with her and led them to the restaurant they had bypassed just a few minutes earlier. He moved so naturally and calmly as if he didn't have every armed organization, legal and illegal, on his heels. Somewhere deep within her the way he could blend in so easily and elegantly poked her with an envious stab: smooth communal behavior for someone, in reality, so antisocial to the core seemed like an atrocious waste while others, sincere but timid, were struggling in the everyday maze of social relations.

Tasting the sauce of her Hot Brown, she looked at him. "Why me?"

The fork stopped dead halfway to his mouth. So now it was chat time again after the obstinate hours of turning the cold shoulder on him and pretending that they didn't know each other – Rippner especially enjoyed that part because he could tell how hard she tried to keep up a façade that would make it obvious how much she considered herself distanced from him; it wasn't easy in view of the physical proximity, and he was gloating over her distress, remembering it was the exact same thing he had used on the plane: deluding everyone around them. He wanted to laugh how she deemed it a personal insult that people approached and handled them naturally and as an item.

Patiently like he was dealing with a particularly obnoxious child, he asked. "Why you what?"

"You know. Why was I chosen for the case? Was it you who chose me or some higher-up assassin of yours?"

The fork dropped back with an annoyed clink against the plate as he stared at her hard. "As a _manager_-"

Lisa flatly interrupted, her voice quiet but steady. "You can phrase it however you want to. Managing assassinations won't make you less of a murderer. Check the law."

"Not all of the assignments require killing someone, Leese." For some reason, on closer examination he found it might sound like an excuse, so he changed his tone and it came easily: the enthusiasm, the slight devotedness, he let it seep through his voice. "It can be anything from obtaining trade secrets to bribing and blackmailing and whatever act without bodily harm you can imagine. The spectrum is much vaster than you would think, every one of them is unique and a challenge on its own."

Lisa gaped at him. He made it sound like it was the most desired job one could crave for: as though when he was a kid and was asked what he wanted to do as an adult, he answered with this horrible tirade.

"What a charming list. But I won't repeat myself. If a butcher now and then sells vegetables, he is still a butcher."

"Nice choice of metaphor," Rippner drawled, lips curled into a hostile curve. "Whatever. So as a manager it was my task to choose the best way to accomplish a task. It means you were handpicked by me."

"What an honor," she scoffed. "So let's get back to the original question. Of all the managers at the Lux, I had the lowest rank to authorize a room change. You realize, they could have easily overwritten my order?"

"Why would they? They know and care shit about the daily nuisances at the front desk."

Lisa didn't answer, only pinned him with an insisting glare. It was a question that had popped up the most times during the darkest hours of despair, but she wasn't sure if there was any answer that would comfort her. Rippner took a sip of water, chased a cube of tomato with his fork, put it in his mouth. Leant back and tugged at the sleeve of his sports coat that covered the bandages just properly – he was back to the suit-and-shirt style again. Then he smirked at her somewhat offensively.

"Why do you think?" he asked snidely, with the hint of a reply she would surely hate. "What's the first conspicuous difference between you and the other managers?"

Lisa frowned, thinking back at the general manager who had dismissed her with a fake expression- this time regret- she'd seen on his face many times on board meetings, quickly giving place to an annoyed- and, by the way, more sincere- look when he was out of the conference room. Actually, he was a man in perpetual annoyance. The sales manager was his complete opposite, an overly muscled womanizer jerk who would have the face to bring up his actual one-night stands to a Lux suite- of course, without paying for the room-, though it was against policy for the employees to use the hotel's facilities and premises. What could Rippner refer to as a difference? _I'm not an asshole like them_, she quipped inwardly.

Then it hit her. That and fractions of memories from the plane, remarks, hints she had poured on her, derogating opinions.

"You male chauvinist prick!" she growled at him with so much disgust that she was amazed how it could fit inside her. In her frenzy she leant over her plate to make sure he would comprehend how despicable his way of thinking was. "You chose me because I'm a woman!"

"Bingo," Rippner consented smugly, not a bit taken aback by her simmering hatred or repentant about his affirmative. He even mirrored her movement by leaning toward her, providing a better look at his gloating face. He loved that moment: the fact that she didn't recoil just so not to lose ground. The green sparkles in her eyes gave her a lively look as if a surge of a lightning was rippling under her skin, ready to break out any minute; a little devilish bog fairy swaying a ghost light – that's how she looked with her lips pursed, bristling. The best entertainment he could imagine for himself right now was finding the words that would ignite this fire.

The fire that had defeated him once, a sober voice in his mind reminded him. That changed his expression into an irritated frown, and he huffed accusatorily.

"Of course, it was a mistake this time."

"You deserved it, you asshole, for thinking I am inferior to you just because of my sex."

Rippner poked the tabletop forcefully with his index finger to emphasize his words. "It is a _fact_, Lisa-"

"What?" she was already half on her feet, the chair squeaking against the floor, but he grabbed her wrist and wickedly pulled her back down.

"Would you let me finish it?"

Annoyed, Rippner quickly cast a sidelong glance around, contentedly acknowledging that they hadn't attracted any long-lasting attention with their little domestic dispute. With her forearm still trapped in his grip, Lisa bit the inside of her mouth and prodded him with a shrug. He kept her there for another second, sprawled across the table, before letting her go.

"It is a fact that women are easier to lure into whatever we may need. I have done it many times, my coworkers have done it many times either; these are numbers, statistics. Exercise influence on their emotions; and it does the trick, they'd yield easily. You just have to find the proper words with them."

Lisa propped against the back of the chair and was debating with herself whether she should simply tune him out. If he detected the rapidly growing distance in her behavior, he didn't show it; as he dwelled on, there was an animated yet cold glint blazing up in the depth of his blue gaze, and it was all Lisa could do not to shrink away.

"They are so easy, not just the women actually, most of the men, too, you can't even imagine how easy. And I was good, one of the best in this, mapping their fears and desires and dreams they had long forgotten to chase. There is always something they want the most: money, sex, fame, power, a big cruiser, a stud farm. There was a guy who wanted to be back in professional boxing; we offered a chance and he took it. Done deal, everyone's happy. They are ruled by their most inner ambitions and cravings. I cracked them open like a nut."

"Stop it," Lisa choked suddenly. "Stop it. You make me _sick_ with every single word."

She tried to shut his words out, refuse to think of her as an easily breakable nut. She almost asked him if he, the perfect creature devoid of such pitiful things like emotions, had any inner craving that ruled him but she decided against it: she didn't really want to know the answer, it was on an intimate level she never wanted to descend- or ascend, depends- to. And more than that, the negative answer she was sure he would give would have made her feel even more unsettled.

The slight tilt of his head supported the perusing sweep of his eyes perfectly. The chaste, unearthly blue behind the lazy eyelids was subdued in the ambient track light above their table. Amused, he was measuring her again. Was it really possible she didn't see herself the way he did? Couldn't see what even he was reluctant to admit: the very contradictory and disturbing, for the lack of better words, admiration he deemed her with for transforming from an overly shallow shell of a human being into a fierce fighter who could level him with employing the number one rule in the cruel world of nature: playing upon _his_ failures? Hadn't it entailed unfortunate events for him, he would have been almost proud to be the one who finally gave her a wake-up kick. On a very primitive level he was enjoying the never-ending bickering they were having and the way that although to a certain degree he thought he knew her, she could still astonish him anytime.

"You shouldn't feel that way: you were one of the few exceptions. Fought me all along the way, even when I thought I could finally break you, and I _know_ I did break you." His right hand- the other was still frozen into the burning ice of pain-, on its own volition, balled into an angry fist at the resurface of several memories. It wasn't that she was the first who fought back; she was the only one he hadn't anticipated to do so. "You were still defying me, on the floor, completely cornered, you were still lying and plotting and demurring. It was pretty impressive. I still fucking can't believe it."

She stared at him, at his strangely glimmering eyes. Was this some sick compliment? Well, she didn't want any of it.

As they left the restaurant after the long awkward silence that reigned the rest of their dinner, she could only hope this crazy suicidal mission wouldn't last longer than she could keep her sanity intact. Because enduring Rippner was sometimes too demanding for her health.


	6. Hit the road, Jack

**A/N: **This one's effin' long, sorry. There might be few things you consider awkward or weird or something, I hope they're not too out-of-character, though.  
And unfortunately, yeah, I have to send them off to a journey so they can spend long time together but I'll try not to deal too much with the trip but with the "relationship" between the two. Sometimes, though, it's a must, hope it won't get too tedious, neither the road nor the uninteresting(?) conversations I make them engage in: it has to begin some way.  
Thank you for the reviews, all of you!:*

**A/N#2:** Lyrics by The Cure: "Homesick".

* * *

**Chapter 6: Hit the road, Jack **

It began with a Sponge Bob episode, the small talk. They would chime in little comments between chuckling and snickering till Rippner made a remark about Lisa showing signs of close relationship with the enthusiastically workaholic cartoon character and received mild obscenities in return. Then it continued with a Top 20 hit list on the radio that both of them happened to disagree with and felt the urge to voice their disapproval.

The next few days were the very example of armistice, two fervent armies settling down in the opposite corners of the battlefield, weapons at feet but the spark for a fight always apparent in the air. Though the terms of their agreement were pretty much unspoken and unwritten, they were still somehow clear enough, and it granted Lisa some kind of freedom. If nothing else gained, she, at least, didn't have to sleep with the handcuffs on.

Their life rhythm in its key points appeared to be quite similar; at least it wasn't something to cause friction between them. When they would get out of bed, they were always wide awake, and unbeknownst to them, they both found it very obnoxious when people were tottering around in a half comatose state for a good half hour: you are either awake or sleeping, there shouldn't be anything in-between. Usually, they would get hungry around the same time and even would order similar dishes: though both of them ate meat, they preferred to reduce the occasions to minimum and often went completely veggie. Evenings were always long for both of them, and if in the mood, normally they could and even preferred to stay up late in the night.

They left Kentucky and through Indiana, headed to Illinois but in a less reckless speed. Lisa, who had previously bought a travel book, appointed herself as a tourist guide, and whenever they reached an inhabited area, she held a little presentation of its attractions. Those mainly constituted things they solidly agreed to regard as stupid: from shoe trees to Santa's Candy Castle (here Lisa got quite excited till she realized it was not by far built of candy) to giant plastic chickens and old rotary jails (inside, she nudged him and asked with a theatrical sigh: 'home, sweet home?' that Rippner didn't find too funny but she didn't mean it a real joke anyway). One time they had bypassed a hacked electric road sign somewhere in Indiana that warned them of zombies ahead: he'd asked her if she was brave enough without her hockey stick to proceed.

From time to time when tired of the long-stretching but surprisingly not awkward silence, they engaged in innocent conversations; Lisa reluctantly, Rippner to while away time, but they subliminally resorted to safe, neutral topics about inane, less important things like commenting the weather, the landscape or the news each hour.

He was telling her that the Oscar was nothing more than a bunch of biased people deciding on the awards based on their preference and what was politically and socially expected at the time, most of the occasions influenced by actual trends like skin color, race or sexual orientation. Though Lisa had more or less the same opinion, she just didn't feel like inclining to agree with him, and for the sake of the habitual quarreling she argued him. He laughed at her mockingly, seeing through her just as much as every other time, and delivered the inarguable question.

"So you think Rocky deserved the award over…?" he waited for her to finish the sentence, and she groaned, knowing full well he knew he got her.

"The Taxi driver." With a sideward glance, she squinted at him. "Don't tell me you didn't like Rocky. A real testosterone-bomb."

"Sure, as a kid, like every kid, I liked it but I'm not sure it was the Academy's best decision. And it's not the only example. Kramer vs. Kramer over Apocalypse now, French connection over Clockwork orange, or just remember how they ignored Citizen Kane…"

"…Psycho…"

"… or hell, Pulp fiction. God, I hate Forrest Gump."

Sulkily, Lisa murmured. "Me, too."

She pretty much hated him, too, then: movies were her territory.

With Miles Davis filtering from the stereos (after a while they'd gotten tired of listening to NPR all day), they had a debate about the best albums in music history, not really settling on a satisfying middle ground result, since the attempt to reconcile Pink Floyd with Led Zeppelin or Depeche Mode with the Beatles and so on was a losing game. Lisa hoped to cut the argument short when in the glove box among a couple of CDs she triumphantly realized that he, too, kept one of her favorite 'rainy day-albums', as she called it, and put Disintegration by The Cure in the player (Rippner, understandably, didn't hurry to inform her that he kept the CD there only because when she'd listened to it in her flat, he wanted to do the same out in his car). After twenty miles, though, he changed it to a CCR Best of, stating that it fitted the long drive and the landscape rushing by much better, and if she didn't insist on him glooming the car off the road, she'd better leave the player alone. Lisa did so only because her mother, in her rebellious teens, had been a Creedence fan.

Feeling relaxed as the familiar music soothed her nerves, she sat with her legs pulled up to her chest. With faint apprehension, she realized he was wonderful in two contrasting things: setting her at ease without her being conscious of it, and with one single word making her see red or fight the swells of terror. With every passing day he seemed to cool off, too, his initial impatience was toned down and slowly, maybe as he regained confidence and control over the situation, she figured, he morphed back into the obscurely outlined man she had gotten to know on that fateful flight – Lisa wasn't sure if she was overly happy about the development.

"Rubidium is Rb or Ru?"

"Ru is ruthenium."

During the long drives when they simultaneously retreated back to their shells and thoughts, Lisa kept herself busy with crossword puzzles she found on the back of the actual newspaper Rippner got at the last gas station they stopped at to refuel. As it turned out, the new habit offered yet another opportunity to talk to each other when now and then a question had her stuck.

"Don't you maybe know the capital of Ivory Coast?"

"Yamoussoukro. With Y in the beginning and OU before and after the double S."

"God, I feel stupid," Lisa groaned, and with a hint of curiosity she asked. "How do you know that?"

"Been there."

She peeked at him astounded. "No kidding."

"Once for five days."

"Government overthrows?" she quipped drily. To her dismay, Rippner nodded.

"Actually, yes, something like that. Someone had to disappear, so he disappeared. It was a memorable Christmas Eve," there was a smirk tugging at the corner of his lips as if bringing down a government was just as much a fond memory for him as decorating a Christmas tree for others. "It was my first international assignment as a co-organizer, and I was so damn nervous that I would botch up something that I hardly took a look around there. Such a pity."

Lisa abandoned the crosswords and chewed at the end of the pen. "So you're in the history books then, all around the world?"

Rippner looked at her with a hesitant laughter, unsure if she was pulling his leg or really meant it.

"No, I'm not. But have seen events, influenced, too, that are taught or will be taught in school one day. A coup in Pakistan, a change in Mauritania, the temporary escape of Chavez, and so on. But of course, most of our contracts are not so high stake or high profile. Those are risky and due to their complexity, we might have to cooperate with other agencies, and this alone, the underlying competition between the various groups as everyone is trying to run on their own agenda, gives it an even higher risk factor. If we can help it, we work alone. But sometimes you just can't manage it alone."

Lisa let the paper slide from her knees to her lap and debated whether she should try to understand how the criminal underworld worked.

"The best is when it's enough to have a guy die in an _accidental_ helicopter crash or get rid of an ex-Yugoslavian minister in the middle of a crowded restaurant in Belgrade and be done with the contract."

"What was your first assignment?"

It, in fact, slipped from her lips before she could even realize the question had formed in her head. She wanted to know something along this line, not exactly what she'd just asked, but before she had a chance to find out what it was, she forcefully banished it from her thoughts.

"I don't think you really want to know it," he snorted softly, and she nodded silently in agreement.

And neither was he about to tell her anecdotes of his cases. There had been a lot of firsts anyway. He, just as most people, started from the bottom as a hitman – they company's conception was that everyone who they considered bound to climb high should get a taste of all fields to have a clear picture how things worked in their entirety. The first international mission had led him to Hungary, where he shot a millionaire with a sound suppressed Agram 2000 while the head of a media empire and many underworld businesses was waiting for the green light in the middle of the afternoon rush hour of Budapest. After he emptied the cartridge clip into the man, recklessly like those aware of their own professionalism- or rather, full of boldness so typical of youths-, left the scene on foot, disappeared in a bar and celebrated with several shots of pálinka, the national brew.

Less than four months later, just a few days after his twenty-second birthday, he was already an associate- or with other words, apprentice- to his now-former manager and mentor and participated in the assassination of Valeriy Hubulov, a South-Ossetian politician, organizing his murder to take place, insolently, at an open market-place.

But the very first assignment, first professional murder as the company's employee was completely different – he had been yet to achieve the coldblooded calmness that he later became famous for. He was having trouble to recollect the events properly and frankly, never really tried to. The important thing was that everything went without a hitch. He had been ordered to use a 9mm Beretta; the bullets sprayed the mark's brain around him in a three feet perimeter. He wiped off the weapon, discarded it, hopped on a bus. At the next station he got off, took a turn into a narrow alleyway and behind a dumpster, right across from the Starbucks Headquarters he laid the contents of his stomach on the pavement: his lunch, breakfast, hell, maybe even a part of his stomach, his past with its moral reservation and imprinted laws of civilization, he upchucked the need, the care even, to define good and bad. And maybe something humane had also ended up in the inglorious mess before him. He'd left it behind and never looked back. Never felt sick after a murder again either. And if he could, he used a knife instead.

Lisa surely didn't want to hear this. As she wouldn't want to hear that he started to tail her, so to say, with fresh blood staining his hands: only two days after managing the assassination of Hikmet Fidan, a Kurdish politician in Turkey. Following a simple front office manager around Miami augured to be a tranquil reward for the excellent job he had just accomplished. And he hadn't changed this opinion up until the moment she ordered a Bay Breeze instead of a Sea Breeze: then it became clear she would be impossibly and unexpectedly difficult.

Beside him, Lisa's thoughts seemed to be all in line with his. "Is there anything apart from money you consider valuable? Because it seems human life doesn't fall in that category."

"It's not entirely true."

"Apart from your life, I mean," she scoffed.

"It's more like it," he smirked, earning a hateful glare from her. It terribly looked like they were marching towards an area full of landmines again, and he wasn't sure he wanted to go there right now. "I never go and examine it from that aspect, Leese. Very quickly you just stop questioning motives, it doesn't matter, none of your business. There is no other way to do it properly. People die, anyway, part of life that is."

Here she inserted a half-raged grunt that he quickly cut short before it could fully explode.

"Besides, good people aren't ordered to be killed."

It was a bit of a stretch of the truth, he knew. And apparently, she knew it too.

"Are you sure?"

He reeled back to rephrase it. "They all know things they shouldn't know."

Those cases could have filled an entire shelf, mostly involving investigative journalists who ended up poisoned or randomly run over in a parking lot when someone wasn't happy with the idea of them harping on a topic at length or attending their scheduled meeting with the FBI.

"Well, that's enough reason to kill someone."

Rippner only shrugged; in his dictionary there was no such word as reason.

"Have you ever failed an assignment? _Another_ one?" Lisa asked suddenly, unable to prevent the fervid gloating seep into her voice.

His fingers turned white on the steering wheel but he immediately loosened his grip as a thunderbolt of pain shot through his left arm. Lisa tilted her head to the side and watched him with an expression that terribly resembled his trademark look of condescending anticipation. He considered leaving the question unanswered but that would simply make her realize she found a sore point.

"No. I've completed tasks where the consequences the client had been counting on didn't meet the expectations but it wasn't my fault," he explained calmly. "And I've orchestrated assignments that got called off underway, like last year in Damascus. Syria is a tricky place. I swear it has the highest density of government secret agents per square mile in the whole world, and it feels like they monitor and follow every single foreigner entering the country. In the end, I had two hours to slip through the border to Lebanon before they would throw me in a very unfriendly interrogation room. Left the Middle East from Beirut – it's a better place to blend in anyway, with the tourists and Starbucks and all the Western shit around."

"You speak Arabic?"

Rippner was surprised to hear clear curiosity in her voice instead of the previous tense resentment.

"So little that it's close to zero. What I've been taught was the Fus'ha, the Literary Arabic which helps you to understand the news but didn't turn out too practical since it isn't used or even understood by the man in the street. Unfortunately, in Syria it's quite complicated to manage things that way."

"You must have been to a lot of places."

"I have." He tore his eyes away from the road and studied her with steadily rising eagerness to learn things he hadn't been able to explore during the Keefe case. "You? Ever left the US?"

"For someone originating from Texas, it's almost obligatory to visit Mexico. And once we went on a London-Paris trip with my family when I was still in high school. It was nothing like anything here," Lisa smiled faintly, placing her chin on her knees and stared ahead. "I wish I wasn't afraid of flying."

"I've never known you were," he had a teasing smile, and she had to bit her tongue not to retort in an ugly way. "But I'm almost sure it's not the only reason, not the _real_ reason, to be precise, that keeps you from travelling."

Lisa looked at him sidelong, puzzled as to what he was referring to. "I'm dying to hear your expert opinion, Dr. Phil."

Rippner had to swallow a chuckle and remarked seriously. "You would hate to elope into unknown."

"Oh, yeah. I forgot I was a rat living in its safe cage," she spat bitterly; pursing her lips she groped for the crossword lying in her lap.

Rippner shook his head with pissed incredulity. "A tigress, maybe, would fit better. The problem's that you don't see it."

Lisa gaped at him silently, trying to read from his fixed features, the profile she had accustomed to almost as much as to her own after the numberless hours of drive but she still couldn't decide how to interpret his remark and particularly, if she wanted to do it at all.

: :

Using the Bentley's hood to spread the roadmap, Lisa leant over to examine the routes crisscrossing Indiana. The sun was playing hide-and-seek all morning and when it disappeared behind a blanket of grey clouds, the wind felt considerably colder. Right now it seemed to shy away again, and Lisa had to literally lie across the hood and pin the map to it with her elbows to prevent it from flying off. Good thing she had bought thick sweaters back in Georgia.

Apart from the Bentley, the only vehicle at the gas station was a truck, the driver, she could see him through the glass door of the shop, had been lingering around the racks full of snacks for the last ten minutes. Rippner had also disappeared in there to pay for the petrol and buy two bottles of water.

It was Lisa's duty to navigate them across the state to Illinois, and she found herself enjoying the possibility to boss Rippner around. She was busy with finding the sights she deemed to be interesting in the travel guide on the map when a paper bag landing beside her with a remarkable thud signaled his return.

"You ready?" Rippner took off the sunglasses serving as a cover as he opened the driver's side door and put the two bottles of water on the passenger side floor.

Lisa folded the map wordlessly, gathered it with the travel guide and the paper bag and joined him in the car. The CD player revived as Rippner started the engine (it was The Cure-time again: she'd stated it matched the somber weather perfectly) and backed out of the lot onto State Route 252. The traffic was almost nonexistent on the two-lane road. As the melancholic tunes floated from the stereo- _Inspire in me the desire in me to never go home_-, there was a moment, a short moment that left her mind levitating in the air when- stricken by emotions along the lyrics and feeling as if she, too, was in aimless search- she didn't mind the present. Didn't mind the weather, the brownish, nondescript landscape, the never-ending road stretching westbound. There was a thought clinging to it that she immediately refused to let erupt. Forcibly, she shook herself out of the alien mood and instead, peeked in the paper bag in her lap, letting loose a soft yelp.

"Oh, God, I love tange-" she faltered to a halt, realizing it was no coincidence, no good guessing from his part. He knew it for a fact that tangerine was one of her favorite fruits.

Looking at him, she couldn't figure out if he was trying to be considerate or it was his new version of boast by rubbing her nose into the fact how much he knew insignificant things about her. Judging by the knowing smirk in the corner of his mouth, it was safer to go with the latter but she picked out a tangerine anyway and munched it heartily. Rippner shot her an expectant glance she couldn't decipher.

"You dropped the complaisant manager mask quite quickly. I was nothing but nice and thoughtful," he barely hid a smirk as seeing her equally annoyed and puzzled face, he scolded. "You could have asked if I wanted one."

"I hope you don't want me to feed you," she grumbled, crunching her face, and dropped the peeled segments in his palm.

In the bag she found a vintage-style postcard of Bloomington, Indiana, and her mouth went dry. He meant it to be the second piece in her little travelogue she had started two days earlier: nothing more than a collection of postcards of places they would pass through or stay a night or two. The first was of Frankfort, Kentucky, and with neat letters she'd written on the back: 31 October, 2005. Suddenly, she felt bad about being so peevish toward him, and as a natural consequence instantly hating him again for making her feel guilty; he didn't deserve any of it. His attentiveness- or the fact that she still couldn't grasp its purpose- was just as much a burden as his hostility could be.

She forced out a very unconvincing thanks that he accepted with the same knowing fleer she could only roll her eyes at.

An hour later they were driving down on the interstate circling Indianapolis, and Lisa buried herself in the map with half an eye on the exits and road signs of adjoining state routes.

"Are we heading somewhere particular or…?"

To her open question she got a standard Rippnerish answer. "Or."

"So I presume we only want to be on the move."

"Impressive logic," he drawled and cut short any further questioning with a slightly dismissive tone. "You just watch the map."

"Roger that, captain."

He shot her a funny glare but Lisa was too busy biting off the head of a gummi worm.

"Your lips are blue," he remarked after a long minute of freely scrutinizing her in the rearview mirror.

"Oh."

"Now that I see, your tongue, too."

She pulled down the visor, checked herself in the tiny mirror and grinned, completely satisfied with the result. When they were kids with her brother, they amused each other with the unhealthy tones of food coloring. She knew it would be a hell to make it disappear.

After long minutes of watching the road signs along I-65, Rippner asked suddenly. "You sure we are heading to the right direction?"

Ceasing her activity of rubbing off the blue hue, she blinked at him a bit sheepishly. "Um, not exactly. I thought we could make a little detour."

"What the _fuck_?" Rippner swirled the wheel to the right and slammed the break. Fortunately there was no one behind them for a good mile at least. Twisting in his seat, he faced her with the full frightening intensity of his glare. "Are you insane?"

"You said we were just on the move," she retorted, wide eyed, and she wasn't aware of it but the seriousness of her accusatory tone got somewhat subdued by the view of her swollen red-blue lower lip. Rippner felt the threat of a smile wrestling him down but it was blown away when she added in that pompous manner she could make him seethe any time. "I thought we might as well enjoy it a bit."

_Christ._ He glared at her incredulously. "Lisa, it's not a goddamn vacation. I'm trying to save our lives here!" He remembered, at a point she even remarked it was pity she didn't have a camera with her.

"Excuse me, I happened to hear you using the word 'our'."

Of course, she had to pick one carelessly uttered word instead of the full meaning of what he said. Rippner squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead with the ball of his hand, irritated.

"As far as I know no one is out there hell-bent on killing me. Or do I have a few-grand bounty on my head, too?"

"Let me enlighten you." At his calm tone, Lisa visibly retreated a few inches, and satisfied, he informed her with a slow, singsong manner he knew she hated. "If they kill me, they sure as hell won't leave behind a witness. Especially not you."

With this matter-of-factly reasoning she could not argue.

"So tell me where we are heading right now?"

"Um…"

Rippner could easily tell by the way her eyes were searching the horizon behind him that she was fabricating an answer that was the less likely to meet opposition from his side.

"The truth, Leese. You should know by now I want blunt facts."

"There is a Wolf park not so far from here," she blurted, blinking at him. Seeing that he was fighting to regain the ability of speaking, she added explanatorily. "A huge park… with wolves."

Suddenly, Rippner didn't know if he should laugh at her clumsy phrasing, the goddamn innocent glinting of her eyes, the absurdity of the moment or let loose his frustration. He decided the latter would support his health way better.

"I won't take a detour to watch some flea-bitten wolves, Leese. You can do it in any freaking zoo."

"I hate zoos. They make me sad."

Rippner shook his head. Well, it _was_ some explanation. _Hell, she is crazy_. He couldn't find his voice, and unfortunately, neither his temper, so he simply turned the key in the ignition. As it turned out, the 'not so far' was more than an hour drive but by the time they were cruising down the narrow road under the canopy of withering foliage that led to the entrance of the park, Rippner was resigned enough not to comment on it. He hardly parked the Bentley when Lisa's fingers were already around the door handle.

"Yupee!" and she was out of the car in a flash. Rippner couldn't believe his eyes: Lisa Reisert had a bounce in her steps. That alone made the whole damn detour worth it.

After a good two hours of watching wolves, enjoying fresh air as they walked down a gravel path along the park and Lisa babbling about adopting a wolf, they left to have a late lunch-slash-early dinner. The sun had set by the time they were back on the state road, and their stop for the night was already in the county of Illinois.

: :

Rippner was in brooding silence all day and unhurried, too, and without Lisa asking for it, leisurely made a northbound detour then a huge U-turn by going on the rural Route 17 so he could take them down on a longer section of the cracked surface of the Mother Road toward Springfield. Eying the vintage billboards of the original Route 66, Lisa smiled to herself with barely hidden enthusiasm. Above the colorful leaves of a magnificent oak, the sky was grayish; a long stretch of a puddle doubled it, blinking up at the black flight of crows. She closed her eyes. The sun drew hesitant shadows on the withering grass; she wanted to go and run, not seeing where, just run away in the wide open and breathlessly lie on the ground. She couldn't quite name the feeling but it was rattling in her chest like a loose bolt.

She caught him staring at her, and for a second her vibrating awe cast its glimmer on him before she could tune it down. From his emotionless face she couldn't read anything, he was good, so good in hiding that she queried if there was any emotion in him to hide at all, but his eyes were lively now like he wasn't able to control their color- sometimes she was sure he was- and in the obscured light, under the broom-like eyelashes, they collected and reflected every turbulence that might occur in him (she was still unwilling to use the word _soul_ in connection with him). Her eyes bored into that gaze, eager to decipher it; he blinked, a lazy sweep of lashes, and the depth of his eyes was gone. She turned away, suddenly downhearted.

"So what's the plan?"

In the morning, when she was in the bathroom, she had overheard him talking on the phone with someone. After a few seconds of intense eavesdropping, she had to realize the conversation was in Italian. Lisa spoke only Spanish, and while she was quite irritated that she didn't understand most of his words, those words she wasn't able to find a similarly sounding Spanish version for, briefly wondered how many languages he was familiar with. Her Spanish was fluent and normally she was proud of this fact but, to be honest, for someone living in Miami it was almost inevitable.

"I pay a visit."

"To whom?"

"Someone."

"Oh, it means we're dealing with a human. Then the options are narrowed down to 300 million people only."

He rolled his eyes at her. "You don't know him so why ask?"

"Obviously I wasn't asking for a name but what you'd want from him."

"To set up a meeting for me."

Exasperatedly, she groaned. "Agh, deep inside you enjoy it, right?"

"Not for a minute," he stated but there was something mischievous in his eyes that told her otherwise. "In contrast to you. I'm sure in your previous life you had to be working for the Spanish Inquisition."

"Very funny. So with whom you want a meeting?"

"My higher-up and ex-mentor in one person."

"Why don't you just call him?"

"I tried but, as expected, the line wouldn't connect," he shrugged, then preceding her next question, he explained. "When someone who you work with on a regular basis, someone close to you gets caught or is in a fishy situation, we change our contact details."

"Alright, then visit him."

He actually laughed at it curtly. "I don't know where he lives. And even if I knew, there was a good chance he wouldn't be there. We're always on the move, from one company-owned apartment to another across the country, depending where the assignments lead us. Not to mention if we have to leave the States."

"Like in Miami? That flat was company property?"

"Yeah. There are a few in my possession, too, some are most probably unknown even to the company but I can't risk and go there now."

"Isn't there some shady headquarters with nondescript premises where the likes of you sit around and plot other people's and societies' demise?"

Rippner snorted and cast a strange glance at her that could be interpreted in many different ways from amused to conspiratorial or patronizing for that matter. His tone supported the latter as if the supposition itself was too ludicrous. "Keefe asked the same. With different wording, of course. I had to make him disappointed."

After a moment of musing, she pointed out softly, devoid of surprise. "So you don't have a permanent home."

"I don't need one. For the short time between assignments any of my flats is good enough for that purpose."

"So you're rootless," she insisted, then declared without a hint of sorry that contradicted her statement. "That's sad."

"Sad?" he spat and glared at her condescendingly. "Just because I don't need the safety of a permanent house like other people, it doesn't mean I can't live this way and still enjoy it."

"Well, it's even sadder that you don't understand how empty it is."

"Empty?" he cracked a laugh, tense with annoyance, voice drenched in utter sarcasm, and acting on the offensive, he looked at her over his shoulder. "You're one to talk. Your life is so full of fun."

At this, she snapped. "Maybe not, but if fun means plotting other people's death, then I'd rather die of boredom."

"One day you might."

"But at least till then I belong somewhere."

"Good thing I don't want to." His lips curved in an arrogant arch that she hated venomously. "Believe me, I understand if it's frightening for you not to belong anywhere or anyone. For most people it is."

His tone conveyed the opposite, and at the little patronizing nods he supported his words with, her hands balled into fists, and she snarled at him through gritted teeth. "How would you know that? What sane people would want you anywhere near them?"

If it hit a nerve, he didn't show it. All Rippner did was turn away with a dismissive wrinkle of his eyebrows as if even the idea of him caring about something so trivial was ridiculous. For the further part of the road, though, he remained in silence. Lisa wasn't one to lament it.

: :

Rippner was sitting on the end of her bed when she ripped the bathroom door open, letting out thick puffs of steam. He was sharing his attention between Yellow Bastard's laptop in his lap and the news on the TV, and didn't even care to look up as she entered in a huff.

"There's no hair-dryer in the bathroom."

His left hand fingers were still a bit rigid as he tapped on the keyboard. Lisa saw he had changed the bandages alone this time as a sure sign he wasn't inclined to interact with her. The wounds had started healing nicely, except for the two deep holes around his wrist that still occasionally ripped open and were oozing blood.

From the corner of his mouth, he dropped the remark. "It's a shitty motel, Leese. You should be grateful there's a bathroom, to begin with."

"Some motel this is," she grumbled, slightly miffed about his attitude.

"It's a no-questions-asked place. And that's the price to pay."

They were staying in a rundown motel north of Springfield, within a half hour drive from the city. They had arrived pretty early – as she found out from his half-grunted words, he was to see his man in Riverton, a village not so far from either Springfield or their motel but the meeting wasn't due before 7 pm next day.

"I assume you don't have a hair-dryer with you, right?"

Rippner looked up at her like she was nuts. Then blinked as he took her in. She must have realized the lack of hair-dryer only after taking a shower because her hair was towel-dry, dotting the hideous Batman shirt with water drops. The normally curly locks were now enveloping her face with a messy stack of wet waves. _Holy fuck_. Something shifted uncomfortably in his guts. For a moment old memories (fantasies even- he was still ashamed to even admit he'd had those about her; it was something normally not typical of him- fabricated in his car parked in her street, back in the numbing hours of standstill) mingled together with the present, and for a reeling moment he wondered how it would be under different circumstances. If they were in her apartment back in Miami. Or better, in his.

"The wet effect is sexier anyway." He couldn't help it, had to say it but covered his momentary brain fart with a deliberately lewd once-over.

Lisa stared back at him, for a heartbeat completely speechless as her stomach rolled upside down. "I'll just pretend I didn't hear it," she decided finally, denial kicking in again, and rushed back into the safety of the bathroom but Rippner's laughter followed her in.

When she came out with a towel around her head, Rippner was still sitting at the same place, concentrating solely on the laptop now.

She cleared her throat and sank onto the sheets behind him. "It's my bed."

Of course, he didn't move, didn't respond either.

Or, in fact, he did when she was preoccupied with pulling on her socks for the night. That was a new habit, he recognized. She either was cold or it made her feel safe as if in socks she were less vulnerable, less naked in his presence, and it made Rippner sneer.

He moved closer behind her back and fixated at a spot below her hairline. Wanted to know if she felt his gaze on her, if it burnt her but she was deliciously unaware. Her scent- he knew it like his own from the time he had been tailing her and shamelessly slipped in her flat, and then later from the plane when he could be within almost intimate range with her- lingered in the air faintly. He inhaled deeply. It soothed him, made him relaxed. Messed with his mind, too. As she crouched a bit forward, the hem of the T-shirt rode down, exposing her neck, and he had to discover the truth behind the tradition as to why a geisha would wear the kimono that way; never before had he realized the nape of a woman's neck could be so tempting. No wonder in Japan it was said to be a primary erotic zone.

In his musing he leant even closer, held his breath so she wouldn't be alerted by it tickling her skin. He could see the muscles fix in her shoulders at the invasion of her personal space and smirked again. She felt him, or maybe not him, but an impending threat, and with the smirk on his lips, with the hunter-hunted bond bursting his chest, he planted a kiss on the nape of her neck.

He could foresee the reaction and it didn't disappoint him.

Lisa gasped like she wanted to suck the very last molecule of air out of the room and before she leapt to the opposite wall with a huge jump, he could see the flood of goosebumps erupting on her skin. For a moment, a horribly frozen, shocked, incredulous moment, she was just standing there pathetically, with one of her socks hanging from her fingers, and frantically rubbed at the spot he had just touched.

Breathlessly, belatedly, she exclaimed. "Are you insane? Why did you do it, you creep?"

There was something wild in her eyes, something terribly frightened too, and it told him if he ever thought to press it, to push her, endanger her in that one way she feared the most, Lisa would go to the very extremity. She might run in the bathroom and attempt to stab him with a toothbrush or whatever she could grasp – him or herself. She would fight him to the last ditch and never break. A sick, he knew it was that, nagging feeling scratched at his chest from the inside, whispered to him to go for it anyway, make her fight and see if she really would not yield, and still try it anyway.

He gulped it down and it burnt his windpipe. Burnt the hole in his throat. The repugnant edge on her face did so, too.

Showing that he was overly satisfied with himself about the result, though, in all honesty, it pretty much seemed faked even to him, he lay back on the bed, propping on his elbows, and just to aggravate her inconvenience, he prompted with heavy insinuation. "I haven't touched a woman in months."

Though it was true, he said it because he knew how uncomfortable she could get at this subject. Of course, he knew her that much. Lisa looked equally abashed and alarmed, and just to balance her flush, she grimaced at him.

"Well, you'd better call the last one because I sure as hell won't be the next."

"I guess that would be problematic," he mused with a hidden smile, directing the subject to his liking.

Grimly, she arched an eyebrow. "Oh, really? Why, she's dead?"

"Nope, she was some girl from the escort agency verified by the company."

Lisa gaped at him, not able to decide which was more disturbing: that his company had a, so to say, private escort agency or-

She opted for going with the latter. "That's gross."

"It's convenient. You pay and get whatever you want." With an awful teasing smile, he quipped. "She let me call her Lisa."

"Screw you. You're disgusting," she flushed deeper, this time with anger that he had the nerve to pull her leg so tastelessly, so disgustingly. Cringing at the idea, she shuddered and just to shake off the feeling, she glared at him obtusely. "Why wouldn't you just go to a bar, you could get-" she coughed and started again. "If you really wanted, you could get _almost_ anyone."

The emphasis was meant to make it clear she wasn't falling in that category. As a retaliation (for what, he wasn't quite sure), Rippner remarked with a disdainful tone.

"Sure but then you have to go through a boring chitchat: Hi I'm Jackson, Hi I'm Li- _Lina_, and all that shit," he mocked on a drawling singsong voice.

For some reason unknown even to her, Lisa took it as an offense and didn't say anything. She realized she was still clutching at her sock and quickly crumpled it up in her fist.

"Come on, don't say it's not tiresome."

It was a smart trap. If she agreed, he would win, if she said the opposite, he'd think she had enjoyed _their boring_ chitchat back in Texas, the insinuation very clearly pointing at it. So she simply shrugged defiantly.

"Well, if you enjoy it that much, tell me how many guys have you engaged in chitchat with in the last two months?" A cruel smile plastered on his face as he feigned contemplation. "Or better, in the last four months? Oh, apart from me, of course."

Lisa stared at him with open animosity. He was at his cockiest again and that ever confident smile snapped on the lying function in her, and she quickly replied. "One! But he's serious."

For a moment Rippner looked completely- satisfyingly- taken aback, but quickly narrowed his eyes. "Oh, really? And what's his name?"

"Barry."

"Hm. Barry what?"

"Bonds," not missing a beat, she blurted the first name coming to her mind. A moment of silence, his eyebrows knitted over his creepy, piercing stare.

"Barry Bonds? Like the baseball player?"

_Oh, snap!_ "What baseball player? He's a new employee at the Lux. Sales department."

Rippner stared at her hard, in place of playfulness anger rising in him like a horrible, muddy tide but couldn't decide which possibility pissed him off in reality: if she lied again or if it was true.

"That's a lie," his oversized ego made the decision for him – it had been whispering to him ever since the airport that after eight weeks of watching her drive away every single man who tried to hit on her, he was the first- and there was a very good possibility that in two_ years_ he was so- who she gave a chance; there was no denial in that that he was highly pleased. The idea that after the surely negative impact of their encounter on her some boring sales guy was able to claim the same achievement enraged him. It'd mean his effect hadn't been as strong on her as he liked to think – like of that other man.

For a fleeting second a ludicrous plan crossed his mind: that when it was over, he would find out if this guy really existed and hunt him down. Why for, though, he didn't stop to consider.

Seething, with set jaw, he barked. "You know how I hate when you lie to me."

"I'm not lying. Besides, I don't see if any of this is your business anyway. You're doing it again, and honestly, I don't get why you would expect me not to lie to you. It's not like we are comrades or friends or lovers," she blinked at him. Where did it come from? In the deafening silence she wondered what made her say the last word but instantly knew it was a mistake when a self-confident, cocky grin appeared on his face.

"Is it a complaint?"

She bristled, turning abruptly toward the bathroom door.

"If you want, I may see what I can do for you."

"I'm off to throw up," Lisa muttered before slamming the door behind her. She wanted to hurt him, his ego as much as possible and as much he had pushed her off-balance. His words, his touch: they made her skin crawl. From the bathroom, she yelled out. "And when I'm out of here, I don't want to see you on my bed."

He pondered to disobey, then pondered to get in his bed and turn off the lights but he didn't want her to consider it as a retreat, that he was cowering in darkness to back out of the conflict. As he finally walked up to his bed, a feeling akin to helplessness overcame him but after further examination he realized he felt offended in a way which was, all in all, quite ridiculous. Shutting off the laptop and settling under the blanket, he rubbed at his face, thinking back the time, a certain week back in August, when he was completely out of control regarding every single waking moment of his life.

Those times he'd continuously been either in a pre- or post-coital state, into and out of a self- or random fuck-partner-induced raging orgasm that left him even more tensed. Tensed and unsated. He'd blamed it on a lot of things: the imminent date of the assignment and the pent-up excitement that usually accompanied it; the unlimited boredom provided by following a seemingly dull woman around and not getting any closer to the core – into the fifth week of surveillance he realized he didn't know anything important, anything personal about her beyond her favorite cocktail and surprising insomnia, and his gut instinct told him there was something off about her but he ignored it: most people were painfully, tediously predictable and the repetitive, safe routine of her days didn't assume anything otherwise. Those people bored him to tears sometimes and as much challenge they had been in the beginning of his career as disappointing they grew when they met his expectations.

He'd also blamed the incredible tension on the fact that she was an eye candy; that he'd been watching her for weeks for no real reason.

So he would go in a random bar and pick up random girls, any girl he met. Mostly, any girl with auburn curls. He didn't even realize this very fact, the sudden and interesting direction in his taste.

They were so easy, the girls. It wasn't more difficult than putting a coin in a machine, pushing a button (in this case coin and button were certain words, smiles, expressions) and he got green light. They yielded, he left, sweaty and on trembling limbs and completely unsatisfied, parked the car in front of her house and pulled down the window to air the car of the stale smell of sex.

It didn't last long. After a week or so he just gave it up, dropped the activity (that, for a sane moment, looked like an OCD fixation along with many other newly-developed ones that didn't bring less anxiety) with the disturbing, fatal subconscious realization that if he wanted an orange, there was no way in hell he could content himself with eating an apple. What it really implied though, the reason and reasoning, the consequence: they were refused by his way of thinking. If he'd been brave enough to admit it, maybe it wouldn't have been too late to abandon the case.

: :

The sign of Exit 108 from I-72 flashed before them in the headlights and Rippner took the road towards Riverton. It was way after sunset and they had ten minutes till the scheduled appointment.

For the whole day, they had been strolling around Springfield. They had decided the previous day that it was the best way to while away their free time till the meeting, and though they both were pretty reluctant to talk to each other, it was no question they would follow the original plan.

As they approached Riverton, Rippner sensed Lisa retreat back to troubled silence. She looked uncomfortable all day but it was hard to decide whether it was the consequence of the previous night or the idea that they were about to meet a fellow assassin – they both kept their thoughts to themselves.

Looking over at her, he hid a smile. It could be either deliberate or coincidence but Lisa hid her neck behind a turtleneck and looked very sullen.

In the morning while she was taking her time in the bathroom, he had left the motel room and crossed the parking lot to the Bentley where he'd removed the tracker from the undercarriage. Lisa didn't have to know that he wanted to meet his contact without the threat that Alvarez would locate the guy and later barge in on him. He'd opted for putting the devise on another car and later retrieving it. For that the best choice was the receptionist's car, and he found out pretty quickly it was the blue Civic he'd seen when they arrived the previous day: it was the only car that could belong to someone resident for it looked like it had been parked in a garage all night: there was no hoarfrost on the windshield – in this business, as he had told her before, little details were crucial.

Soon they left Riverton behind and were driving across the rural area surrounding the village, and Lisa strained her eyes to see any sign of life in the darkness. Soon the road turned slightly, and partially covered by an avenue of trees a mansion peeked at her with its lit windows. It looked different from the plywood houses with white siding that lined the streets of Riverton. It was a two-storey brick building with a long portico and a balcony in the front. Rippner parked the car in front of the two steps leading up to the entrance and silently, they got out of the car.

Nervously but in fervent attempt to hide it, she wiped her clammy palms against her jeans as Rippner caught her by the elbow.

"Don't forget you're my hostage," he reminded her harshly.

"How could I?" she hissed back, and thus the dominant spirit was perfectly prepared.

The door that opened to a little dimly lit hall was ajar. Without hesitation, Rippner stepped in and pulled her with him. He moved around with a confident air that told Lisa it wasn't the first time he was here. Behind a door to a large, richly furnished room, a man of Rippner's age and built, clad in beige suit, looked up at their entrance.

"Jackson," there was an amiable smile on his face as he stood from the leather couch and took a step toward them. A slight accent mingled in his syllables. As the light illuminated his face properly, Lisa vaguely noted the crème-colored skin and dark eyes, wavy hair that made the stranger though not classically handsome but definitely attractive in a standard way. Lisa briefly wondered if he, too, was an assassin or worked for the company in another way, or he was one of those strings Rippner could pull when needed.

Beside her, Rippner let go of her arm and smiled, too, a bit less brightly. "Michele."

Lisa, glad for the opportunity that she could linger behind, glanced around the room behind Rippner's back as he stepped closer to their host. They were alone as far as she could tell; the track lights above a dark coffee table in the middle cast long shadows on the right hand side of the room, enveloping the nicely framed paintings and wooden chests in darkness. Everything about the premise, the house even (though she hadn't been able to perfectly make it out in the poor light) was very Italian, and despite the predicament, she had to compliment the interior decorator.

Her gaze fell back on the man the same time as he turned to survey her. In the slightly impish eyes, she saw the flame of amusement. He looked at Rippner and arched a teasing eyebrow.

"Quest'é la ragazza? É di cinquanta chilogrammi?" And he uttered a deep, Santa Claus-like laughter. As far as she could understand the words, the mockery of her light weight was an insinuation aimed at Rippner for letting someone like her beat him. Neither of them found it too funny, though.

The warning was apparent in Rippner's voice. "Michele."

The Italian lifted his arms in a placating way. "Good to see you, Jackson."

The named stepped closer, arms lifting slightly. There was a blur of limbs and fabric. Rippner moved so fast that Lisa couldn't even make out the motion. He spun the other man, pressed his back to his chest, left arm strangling him, the other hand holding a small handgun, a Smith & Wesson revolver that obviously wasn't his.

"That was transparent, Michele. And you still move as graceful and quiet as a gorilla, Luca."

Lisa looked around, confused, and only then she could see another man in the right half of the room, hidden in shadows beside a cabinet. She hadn't even seen there was a door in that wall; how could Rippner hear him enter? As she nervously squinted, she could see the silhouette of a taller, lanky man with a gun trained at Rippner. He, on the other hand, was calm as ever, with a hint of haughty boredom to his voice.

"Drop the gun. I didn't come here to hurt anyone but I won't hesitate if you force me. Drop the gun."

The guy called Luca stared at him grimly. Rippner, keeping the perfectly alert Michele in place, stared back at him just as much so, then tilted his head with a half-smile. "Ciao, Giovanna. Come stai?"

"Hi, Jackson."

Lisa snapped her head to the side and started by the sudden appearance of a young girl about fifteen-sixteen. She didn't look a bit unfazed by the scene as if having a madman appear in their house and threaten them with a gun was an ordinary thing. Maybe, Lisa thought cringingly, it really was.

Michele, rendered motionless in his death grip, barked at Rippner. "Leave her alone."

"Chill, I was just greeting her. Giovanna, why don't you take Lisa to the kitchen for a drink or something?"

The girl shot Lisa a scrutinizing glance from the corner of her eyes and quirked an eyebrow. "É lei la tua ragazza?"

Rippner smirked at the suggestion whether Lisa was his girlfriend, and did so even more when he caught her blinking with a suspicious yet obviously lost expression, clearly trying to understand the words.

"No." He looked over at Luca who was still lingering at the wall, gun raised. "Why don't you go with them and make sure she doesn't escape? She can be pretty unpleasant, so watch out."

Luca took a hesitant step toward them while Rippner, to prove he'd meant his words, slowly released Michele. He stared hard at Lisa who was more than displeased that she was forced to leave him behind to discuss with the other man without her supervision, and barked: "You behave."

"Go to hell."

She was shooed by Luca toward a third door to the left and as she followed the young girl, from the corner of her eyes caught a flash of sudden movement. Lisa turned her head just in time to see Michele, completely out of blue, punch Rippner in the mouth.

In the moment of frozen halt, she smirked as the Italian remarked gruffly. "I owed you this, remember?"

"Fair enough," clutching and shifting his jaw from left to right then left again as if trying to detect if it was still in one piece, Rippner nodded and before anything else was said, Lisa was shoved out of the room.

The kitchen they entered was as large as half of her flat in Miami. Three of the walls were lined with redwood cabinets with dark green marble countertop. In the middle, the island was encircled by several bar stools. Giovanna waltzed to the refrigerator while Luca remained at a strategically perfect spot by the door, leaning against the wall casually but with a hand lingering by his waist – and there, by his gun.

"Want Marsala?" Giovanna asked with a mirthful smile, holding up a bottle with a hopeful glint in her brown eyes. Luca cleared his throat but didn't say anything. The young girl looked over at him snidely. "We have a guest now."

Lisa had heard a lot about the Sicilian wine but never tasted it. Maybe it wasn't a logically sound time to start it but she shrugged nonetheless. "Sure."

As Giovanna filled two glasses, not even bothering to ask Luca if he wanted too, Lisa asked carefully. "Is Michele your…?"

"Brother," she finished it for her as pushed the glass across the counter toward her.

Tasting the wine, she smiled to herself, widening the smirk as Giovanna clicked her tongue appreciatively and chuckled at her. Trying to satisfy her own curiosity and break the silence, Lisa proceeded with the questions.

"Is he friends with…um?" She trailed off, not knowing how to call Rippner because her tongue didn't seem able to form his first name, but Giovanna knowingly shrugged.

"Well, as much as Jackson has friends, I guess. They've worked together a lot."

"Do you know what that work is? Do you know what your brother does?"

"More or less, sure."

"What?" Lisa couldn't quite hide her surprise and resentment. Incredulously, she narrowed her eyes. "And aren't you-?"

Giovanna cut in. "We are from Catanzaro, Calabria. Back in Italy, my grandfather was a… um, _come si dice_… henchman in the mafia. So it runs in the family. But Michele says this age is not for the mafia. He says the money-"

"-is shit. Yeah," Lisa mumbled, remembering Rippner's wording from the plane.

Pouring another half glass of wine for both of them, Giovanna inquired. "Why is Jackson here?"

Lisa shook her head half-frankly. "I don't know. Guess he needs help."

"Help?" Giovanna laughed shortly like the idea was ludicrous in itself. "He's lucky Michele isn't unforgiving. The last time I saw him was in the summer. We were in Tallahassee, I remember because I was watching the news of Katrina approaching."

Suddenly alert, Lisa nodded giddily. It was the end of August then. Just a few days before she got the news of her grandmother's death. Not more than a week before the red eye flight.

"He looked very… _agitato_."

"Nervous?" she guessed as the girl tried to find the appropriate word. "Tense?"

"Yes, tense. They were quarrelling with Michele. My brother was yelling at him that he should stop following… uh," biting her lip, Giovanna looked unsure.

Lisa's stomach clenched. "Who?" Her mind had already wrapped around numbers and weeks in the calendar: by then he'd been following her for seven weeks.

"Not who," Giovanna giggled, and to Lisa's surprise she blushed a bit. "His… _cazzo_…"

In the background, Luca snorted. "Cock."

"What?" Lisa blurted, completely dumbstruck by the unexpected reply and completely unable to catch the meaning behind it.

"I don't know what they were arguing about," Giovanna admitted. "But Jackson hit Michele in the face. That's why he gave it back now. My brother told him he wasn't objective anymore and he put himself in danger."

Lisa furrowed her brows, thoughtfully whirling the glass between her fingers. Rippner must have been engaged in some dubious case that endangered the Keefe assignment – she couldn't come up with a better explanation; right then and there, she didn't _want_ to. It was somewhat confirmed when Giovanna added from behind the rim of her glass.

"When later we heard about his arrest, Michele said he wasn't surprised."

Numbly, Lisa watched her grab the bottle but this time Luca snapped authoritatively. "Giovanna, é basta."

"Soltanto un poco," the girl whined still clutching the wine, lifting her other hand and measuring an inch with her thumb and index finger, and with that a curt quarrel in rapid Italian broke out.

After an hour of conversation on nothing in particular, Rippner entered the kitchen. He still seemed a bit edgy but- though he always showed a cool exterior, Lisa would still in most cases sense his tension- definitely more relaxed.

"Leese, we're leaving," without objection, Lisa stood and walked up to him. Rippner didn't spare a glance at her but nodded pleasantly to the young girl. "Ciao, Giovanna, stammi bene."

She smiled, frisked to him, and stood on tiptoe, offering her cheek naughtily.

"Your brother would kill me, you know," Rippner smirked right when Michele came in the kitchen, barking at her sister in Italian.

In the oncoming storm of a fierce argument, they left the house almost unnoticed.

: :

The thirty-minute ride back to their motel was permeated by thoughtful silence after to her initial prompt question as to what he had been discussing with the Italian, instead of an answer she got the usual blank look and nothing else. Lisa couldn't decide what exactly bothered her, if it was only a flickering sense of foreboding or she was simply unsettled by the incident that'd happened the previous night; anyway, she was in a grumbling mood.

Later in the motel room Rippner watched her fumble around for a moment with a smile hidden in the corner of his lips.

"She gave you some wine, right?" At her inquisitive yet dark look he added. "She always takes the opportunity to pilfer it."

Lisa frowned. Indeed, she could feel the Marsala tugging at the periphery of her vision and dulling the edge of her consciousness. She wasn't much of a bibber and it disturbed her that he could see the slight tipsiness in her movements. Instead of letting the topic go in that direction, she noted. "You two seem pretty… cozy." If anything, it came out accusingly.

Rippner took off his jacket and draped it over the back of a chair as an amused, smug smile grazed his lips. "I guess Giovanna has a little crush on me. And obviously Michele thinks the same."

"That's disgusting."

His head snapped toward her, and she could tell by the way his eyes flashed that he was surprisingly pissed at her remark. "Tell that to her."

"Not that… that too," she hastily corrected herself twice. "But the fact that her brother thinks he has a reason to be worried and distance her from you."

"It's that protective brother kick, Leese. You should know it the most."

"Uh-huh," she stared at him grimly, feeling even more furious that beside so many things he knew about her brother, too.

"Michele says in this crazy age a girl must be protected in every possible way."

"From people like you." Lisa meant it as sarcasm to show that it was a self-righteous thing coming from a criminal when they were the ones making the world crazy. Obviously, Rippner interpreted it otherwise.

"You can accuse me with a lot of things, most of them true, but not with this. It's just simply sick."

"I'm surprised there is something even you consider too low."

"Quite a lot of things fall into that group."

"Funny from someone who kills for money without a second thought. Kind of twisted ethics. And hypocritical, too," she crossed her arms over her chest, looking over at him coldly.

For some reason, she felt horribly upset but couldn't find the reason for the life of her. All she wanted was to ease the tension and the best way was to verbally lash out against him.

"We know for you it's just the question of money. For a few grand your lofty, pretentious morals are on sale, too. Just like your loyalty for your oh so loved company – you're snide enough to betray even those you claim to be important for you; you're no better than a snake with no backbone whatsoever," in her rush of anger she failed to see the ice-cold flames light up in his eyes, just as she failed to realize he'd taken a strained step toward her. "There is nothing respectable in this mission, I hope Keefe doesn't keep his promise and puts you back in jail, anyway, regardless the result. You are after all nothing but a despicable, repulsive murderous snitch."

If there was anything else she wanted to tell him died suddenly in her throat the next minute when, like a juggernaut, he charged at her. With the poisonous words a cry of surprise got lost in her, too.

"You-!"

The lone word stretched from his lips like a never-ending vile curse as he grasped her throat with wire-fingers and the momentum of his attack pushed her backwards a good couple of feet before her calves hit something hard, and she felt herself falling. The landing was painful only because he ended up on her, the bed warding off most of the impact. Rippner's hands had slipped off of her neck in an instinctive move to support his body but soon found a new place for them. He gripped her upper arms, pinning them, and straddled her hips. His elbows painfully pierced her forearms.

He sensed he lost the connection with the rational, cool part of his brain, just like back then in her father's house. This was the only sane realization in his head, but the maelstrom of the wild mixture of anger and some kind of impotent disappointment pulled him down mercilessly, and he wanted nothing more than to crush the infectious pain that chewed at his inside like a maggot, and it was a logical idea to accomplish it by crushing her, physically or mentally, didn't matter.

Lisa inhaled with effort. Rippner felt like a rock on top of her, pressing her in the mattress with unyielding force. His face was full of murderous venom, snarled something incoherent but through gritted teeth and her own thundering blood in her ears it was impossible to understand, and in panic, Lisa tried to push him off with her thighs again and again but he didn't budge.

Suddenly, he blinked, taking a quick glance where his sharp hipbones cut in her belly, and with strained, hoarse voice still laced with anger like he'd been yelling for hours, he asked. "What's this good for? To turn me on?"

Lisa stopped all movements, fighting the urge to throw up in his face. It crossed her mind that maybe she shouldn't fight it that much.

"Get off of me, you sick fuck!" she growled, her throat threatening with closing up completely.

His eyes flicked: it was like closing the blinds before a window. As rage reappeared, the light blue turned a few shades darker, and for once, his face was anything but unreadable. It was the display of pure, animalistic fury that immediately froze her stomach, and despite her own blinding dread and repulsion, she caught a glimpse of something akin to hurt crossing his eyes.

"Sick fuck?" he snarled in her face. "And you are an irritating little bitch. No wonder you got raped! Maybe he just wanted to kill this. Goddamn. Superiority. Out of. You!" with every word, he shook her, not even realizing that somewhere in the middle of his speech, she'd gone limp in his hands like a rag doll.

Looking at her, he stilled.

Lisa was staring at the ceiling with a blank look on her face. Her slightly agape lips seemed like they petrified in the effort to utter a word.

Through the bitter, mind-numbing fog in his head, through the hurt- yes, it _was _hurt her words had evoked in him- he realized something: it was probably a harsh thing to say. But there was no regret in him, no place for it when his anger was so huge, so hungry. She deserved it, the little stuck-up Holy Mary. That, at least, made her shut the hell up. _Just don't start crying_, he thought disgustedly and sat up.

Something in Lisa's mind failed to connect and her brain ejected his words immediately. It sounded like she'd deserved the whole ordeal in the parking lot. She wanted to grab a chair and beat him till he moved, claw his eyes out, scream at him but she was too numb to collect strength even to stand up. It was like someone had zapped her mind unconscious.

Rippner ran a hand through his hair, turned his back and moved to sit on the edge of the bed. For a moment it almost slipped from his lips: an apology. But he sucked it back quickly. There was nothing he had to apologize for.

The minute hand of the clock on the wall turned a notch. Then moved another. It was like they'd frozen into a stance as the air froze around them, too. Then silently, wordlessly, because to an offense like this there was no proper answer, she stood, collected her pajamas and disappeared in the bathroom.


	7. Silent crevasse

**A/N:** Can't stop blabbing, so it's long again.

**EmpireX:** The Cure is my newest love^_^ Can't wait for your CCR version:) You know I almost wrote some scenes in Springfield, should've asked some tips from you XD  
**Isee:** LOL, no hun, I'm not an author, just a geek who should get a life and think less of fictional characters and their fictional issues :P

_Thank you all for the reviews!_

* * *

**Chapter 7: Silent crevasse**

The weekend went by silently. Rippner made them move slowly across Illinois and venture into Iowa but Lisa had the feeling he didn't want to get too far from Springfield. She didn't care that much to ask him about it.

They hardly talked to each other. Even the necessary questions as to whether the other needed a stop or was thirsty or hungry or tired went with the least words. Other than speaking with strangers during their stops at motels or restaurants, they didn't quite overstrain their vocal chords. They went on with their usual routines, meals, stops and half-hearted, time-killing sightseeing without the need to discuss it, and sometimes she pretty much felt she was alone on this trip. Lisa was more than fine with it, but she realized he, surprisingly, pretty much wasn't. There were times she faintly sensed he was trying to break the ice that grew thicker and thicker with every unshared word, getting more and more uncomfortable but she wouldn't let him, and in the end he always retreated back in airy apathy far too easily.

She wasn't keeping it up because she was bearing a grudge, not because she wanted to punish him with her silence (wouldn't think it bothered him that much anyway), simply in her eyes he didn't hit the level required in any normal society; Rippner was just somewhere and something very much below it. It was easy to disregard him, to answer with simple sentences to his very occasional questions. She wasn't angry with him, maybe in a way not even hurt by those words he cast in her face because he was nothing, just a breath away from the _other man_. Whatever he would do or say was judged against a scale she would use when judging any lowlife creature. She never stopped to consider her own words: she had been harsh to him but everything she said was true. If the truth hurt him, it wasn't her fault.

In a way what had happened between them in the motel near Springfield was no surprise: deep inside, Lisa had been waiting all along for a display of such uncivilized manner from his side because she was dead sure it was lurking under the forced friendly front he was recently masking himself with around her. The fact that he didn't consider his remark crude, didn't try to apologize and behaved like it was she who made a mistake here, added yet another point to her list about his inhumanity.

She could anytime pay it back with her own inhumanity, if needed.

Around the end of the second day of their personal cold war, without the slightest interest or compassion, she watched him rip the wound on his wrist open as he accidentally scraped it on the car door. Above the bloody mess their eyes met, and she leveled him with her own cold gaze. They had a discount on unfrosted Pop-Tarts at the gas station so she rushed in vigorously.

Rippner had to deal with the damn bandages, antiseptics and medical tapes alone, and in any other time it would have been completely all right, natural even, but now it somehow disturbed him, and losing his patience, he treated his wound roughly and without care. By the time he finished and entered the shop, she was already halfway out.

Suddenly, he felt horribly tired. When he left the shop a few minutes later with a paid petrol bill and a bottle of water, except for his Bentley, the parking lot, bathing in the orange glow of the sunset, was empty. The car, too.

He frantically looked around for Lisa before spotting her on the other side of the road. She was facing the slowly descending sun, sitting on a wooden fence that lay half-fallen in the grass – someone seemed to have ended up against it with their car on one point in its history. Rippner looked back at the shop, sighing. He fucking needed a cigarette. Or a bottle of whiskey.

For a long pathetic minute he was standing there, in the middle of the parking lot and stared at her dark outline. She seemed to be relaxed, head tilted on one shoulder as she lazily stretched her legs before her. Rippner could tell Lisa wasn't in bad mood; she would actually smile at the waitress, at the receptionist, the guy at the gas station, even croon along with the radio – and somehow this very fact aggravated his low spirit.

Her silent treatment grew more and more annoying. He sensed her behavior conveyed an air like she was alone. She'd perfected the act of giving a cold shoulder, and there were moments when Rippner pretty much felt like he was transparent, nothing but condensed air into a despicable, see-through shape. She maintained it flawlessly, without appearing forced, without fidgeting from the awkward silence that stretched between them into infinity, and it was worse. It told him she didn't regard him as a human being, behaved like she was travelling with a half-intelligent orangutan. He didn't know why it bothered him, why he felt offended by her unconcealed contempt, why he found it unbearable that she seemingly mastered and turned a method against him that usually was _his _trademark.

He crossed the road and sat on the other end of the fallen log of the fence. Lisa didn't acknowledge his presence in any form or way. Rippner unscrewed the bottle cap and took a long sip, pretending it was whiskey. Hell, pure ethanol, even. Behind the waist-height stacks of grass and weed, the sun reached the horizon, pulling the violet and orange smudges of the sky lower and lower with it. Above them everything was homogeneous dark ink blue and most probably cloudy, judging by the lack of stars. The cold night air bit in his skin and his raw wound ached under the bandage.

And then, between taking a gulp from the bottle and someone pulling in the gas station with loudly puffing motors behind them, it slipped from his lips. "It wasn't a right thing to say. A fair thing."

Lisa looked at him, at his profile, to be precise because he was staring ahead rigidly like he had been talking to himself. She lifted her eyebrows, but didn't say anything. His hand had a vice grip around the plastic bottle; he realized it only when it scrunched under the pressure and he loosened his grasp irefully. Her muteness was telltale: she was waiting for something; and suddenly pissed because she had been just as cruel as he, Rippner snapped. "That's the most I can say. You either accept it or not."

In the rapidly growing darkness, with half of her face painted orange, she was still staring at him, unblinking. Her right eye that was illuminated by the last rays of sun glimmered animatedly, the other seemed cold, relentless. Rippner deemed it unnerving, and yet again, he found himself on the receiving end of his own weapon but he wasn't one to back out of a challenge.

Lisa weighed his words, weighed the situation, weighed even his personality. Examined him, drilling her gaze into his, studying his somewhat tense posture and recalling everything she knew or thought about him, Suddenly, she realized that as much as he seemed to be nonchalant and condescending about the whole situation, he willingly forced himself into something he, it was clear, rarely did. And with that she realized his regret right now was the closest thing she would ever get as a sincere apology. Typical of him, he called it 'it', couldn't even name it for what it was. It wasn't clear why he was bothered by the return of the utterly hostile air between them but an act like this from someone as antisocial as him was a step toward humanity.

Slowly, she nodded. "Alright, let's pretend you never said that."

She didn't say _I forgive you_ or _let's start it with a clean slate_ just as he hadn't said _I'm sorry_. Her remark was more sarcasm than anything else, closer to pointing out the very opposite: it wasn't anything that could be forgotten. Rippner perceived it but nodded nonetheless. For long, frozen seconds they held each other's gaze before Lisa turned back to the sun that was now nothing more than a glowing crescent on the edge of the horizon.

When she looked up next, he was still eying her, something tense, expectant and hesitant sewn in his brows; on his lips: a birth of a small smile – just a promise of a smile, an offer of truce. She returned it with a taut one of her own, stood and without a word, strolled back to the car. Rippner lagged behind only for another minute.

: :

The call came on rural I-380, right before they reached the Cedar River. Both of them were startled out of post-lunch reverie at the unfamiliar sound of the ring tone. As Rippner fished the cell phone out of his pocket and answered the call with a curt 'Yeah?', Lisa briefly wondered at the interesting fact that how easy it was for her to get used to the lack of communication devices in the boom of the information age.

In the meantime, Rippner played his favorite game of one-word answers and interrogatives that helped her nowhere near to find out what he was talking about.

The call didn't last more than a minute but the effect on him didn't wear off for hours. After ending the call, he pulled over and for long minutes, with his head leant against the headrest, he was staring at a spot on the roof of the car and maybe beyond it. Lisa didn't dare to move and unconsciously fixated another invisible spot somewhere on the hood. She could tell it was the call he'd been waiting for for days, and Lisa knew him that much by now to almost see the cogwheels in his head move a tooth, and another, as he was working his way through the possibilities and ways that lay ahead of them.

When he revived the engine and took an unexpected U-turn at the first possibility so they were on a southbound drive, she asked softly.

"Where are we going now?"

"South."

"Hm, never could have found it out," she murmured.

Rippner moodily remarked. "That's all I was told. To head south slowly. So now we leave Iowa and cross Missouri. I won't get a call with the details before Wednesday."

"So it was your boss?" To that, no surprise there, she didn't get an answer so she pressed on. "Did he sound royally pissed at you?"

Only the poorly hidden malicious tone in her voice granted her a reply in the form of a glare; she could see his nostrils twitch as he bit on the inside of his lips to refrain from an ugly retort, and with that, the communication between them was suspended for the whole section of the drive in Iowa.

It was already 5 pm when they crossed the border to Missouri. With a peanut M&M's bag in her lap, Lisa stared out her window at the sky: the sunset was drowned in clouds this time as a storm was approaching from northwest. Digging into the bag, she fished out the last blue peanut and munched it unhappily. From the bottom of her Maslow pyramid where she was staying and fighting physiological needs right now Lisa scowled at him frustrated from time to time: she started to get hungry- hungry for _real_ food- but Rippner turned in on himself quite permanently and didn't show any signs for human needs whether they were words or simple bodily wants like eating.

Lisa started as without warning, he leant towards her side, and couldn't help the little jump her legs made as they moved out of his hand's way on their own volition. He didn't comment on it; opened the glove compartment and after a few moments of rummaging in it and watching the road from the awkward angle, he retrieved a cigarette pack. With one hand on the wheel, he flipped the box open with his thumb, shook it, and pulled a cigarette out with his mouth – as he jerked out a lighter, too, Lisa could see the box was half empty.

The news block on the radio ended with the weather forecast: rainy, stormy in the next few days. As Rippner pulled down the window, the humid-scented draught caught the last words of the anchor and jolted them out of the car. In the cover of his hands, he lit the cigarette; raspy scraping of the flint, a crackle as the flame bit in the tobacco. Slowly, he blew the smoke out the window.

She wrinkled her nose at the stinging smell.

"I didn't know you smoke."

"You don't know shit about me," he stated bluntly.

In fact, it was true (sometimes she tended to forget that technically she'd known him only for ten days or so – those four hours on the plane had stretched so long it seemed like a lifetime; the effect it rolled with itself was so huge, the experience so intense, going through many different stages both in physical and mental way, Lisa felt she knew everything about him) but being reminded that it was anything but mutual and hearing it so flat out, so superiorly, fueled her.

"Oh, of course, I forgot it wasn't me following you for eight weeks."

He groaned; rubbed at his eyebrows, dragged on the cigarette. With a careless move of his fingers he flicked the butt, and the ash flew off in the wind. As he exhaled, the muscles in his jaw relaxed.

"I don't smoke," he remarked finally, sounding a bit appeasing. "Just every now and then."

Lisa, in a huff, ignored him and rolled down the window. She had to shield her eyes against the biting rush of air, and propped her head with her elbow on the door. In the cover of her fingers her eyes were drawn to him almost against her own will, and she watched him, the faintly smoldering cigarette as it hung lazily from his lips, nearly falling out; he inhaled- the sharp cheekbones more prominent as his cheeks hollowed-, closed his eyes for a fraction of a second; a fickle of wrist, he pulled the cig away and blew the smoke out the window. Her gaze followed his thumb drawing circles on the butt; with his head back against the headrest, he was keeping his eyes on the road but was deep in thoughts with a distant touch to his face.

A latest hit played to boredom started on the radio. To occupy her hands, eyes, thoughts, she picked out a red M&M's and crunched it noisily.

The distraction was momentary. As Rippner lifted his hand to the bridge of his nose and pinched it, massaging the corners of his eyes, she peeked at him, irritated. The smoke lingered around him for a minute before dissolving in the draught. Somehow, Lisa discovered, there was something intimate about the scene, about him right now, and she fidgeted like she was spying on him in a private moment, prying in his thoughts. The moment stirred something deep within her that made her terribly uncomfortable.

Before he could hit it again- and because she knew, for some reason, she was too morbidly curious _not_ to watch him, though it was unclear why it seemed a phenomenon to her-, Lisa snatched the half-smoked cigarette from between his fingers and threw it out of the car. Rippner, jolted out of his reverie, scowled at her. There was another short stare-match before he reached toward the glove compartment but Lisa beat him at that and sent the pack after the cigarette.

At his frightening glare, she blurted out quickly, quietly. "I hate cigarettes. When I was a kid, my mother used to smoke and one time she almost accidentally burnt my eye out. Fortunately it was only my temple but ever since then…"

He didn't comment on it, maybe he didn't care but she didn't care either.

Reaching toward the buttons built in the door handle, Rippner pulled up both windows.

He bit down on his lower lip, feeling the smoky taste of tar, but stopped when it got mixed with the coppery savor of blood – he really needed a redirection activity. Annoyed, he stared at the woman beside him, looking daggers at her for the lost cigarette but she failed to notice it in the constant searching and digging in the freaking M&M's bag. He wasn't famous for vices. The occasional smoking was his only foible. Back in the past he'd had his own short period of getting wasted or high, but ever since his life had turned on the professional route, he discovered the danger in sowing his wild oats, and drugs and alcohol were strictly ruled out in his life. He would, of course, have his own share of quality drink from time to time but never till to the point to get totally shitfaced. He could line up only one reason for it but it was a weighty one: his only and utter fear of losing control. He valued his brainpower too much, was more than strict about keeping everything under his supervision, and in altered state of awareness this was the first thing he would lose; not being in check of what he was doing terrified him.

After a few minutes of tolerating the never-ending rustling and fumbling and crunching, Rippner opened his window again, reached over and threw the M&M's bag out the window.

"Hey, what are you doing?"

"It's just fair, don't you think?"

After a moment of pondering, Lisa simply slumped against the door with a defeated look. Even her lips curled a bit downward.

"I left the yellow ones the last. I love the yellows."

Rippner squinted at her incredulously, and taking in her expression, he let out an amused laugh. Then after a few seconds of musing, he shot her a glimmering glance.

"So you set aside the best things, risking you'd lose them before you get there?"

"You mean before a madman throws them out the window," she mumbled, still pouting, but the corner of her lips betrayed her a bit as it twitched slightly.

"I was just following a bad example."

"Uh-huh." Sideways, she studied him. "So you consume everything in advance and go on with whatever is left?"

"As long as I'm young, I guess, yeah. Better eating the yellow ones at once than not eating them at all, right?"

With this reasoning she couldn't really argue. Rippner pursed his lips musingly.

"On a second thought, in this case the latter serves your health better. You shouldn't eat that unhealthy crap, anyway. It's full of E330 and all its little brothers and sisters."

"Huh, this from the guy who smokes."

"_Occasionally_ smokes."

"Wow, big difference. I _occasionally_ eat this."

Then suddenly Lisa laughed. She couldn't believe they were here, talking about food preservatives. She couldn't believe that against all reasoning she felt relaxed. Her clear laughter rolled off her lips like playful pearls, and amused, Rippner looked at her and smiled. His face pulled on an almost foreign expression, completely strange and irresolute on his features like someone practicing a facial gesture for the first time in years, moving muscles that hadn't been moved for far too long. It was a genuine, true smile. Not a smug sneer. Not even a cocky grin or a fake flirtatious smirk. This time it reached his eyes, a twinkle in the blueness. He looked young and innocent as if no blood stained his hands. For the first time ever since she'd joined him at the Tex-Mex, she noticed how handsome he actually was.

Somewhat confused by the discovery, Lisa turned away, and to fill the silence, to fill her own mind with something other than the awkward thought, she sighed. "Right now I could eat a huge plate of fideuà."

"You're not talking about that Tapastico Bar, are you?" he exclaimed, eyebrows wrinkling in disbelief. "I have no idea how you can even eat there! Do you know _Miguel's_ in Southern Miami?"

"I guess no."

"The guy who runs it is from Spain, worked at the Can Paixano in Barcelona where the tapas is almost exquisite. At Miguel's you get the best in Miami. They have the perfect boquerones, too."

A bit offended, she argued. "That's good at Tapastico, too."

"Not even near that. You know what? I'll take you there and you'll realize how crappy it is at Tapastico."

"I don't know, I can be quite fastidious about the vinegar they use sometimes."

"I have no idea what exactly Miguel uses but believe me, it's good. You'll see."

Only then did they realize how awkward it was, unrealistic even; in the course of the days eating together became natural, part of their lives, and that moment that was what messed with their mind, resulting in them making a dinner appointment for a future date when they should be as far from each other as they could get. It came out as if they weren't some kind of enemies, like they would ever meet again when it was finally over. Sometimes both of them tended to forget it was only a constrained, temporary alliance between them, and they weren't here to build something meaningful, something long-lasting upon these shaky, sandy grounds. Lisa laid her head against the cold glass and unseeing, stared out at the faint lights of a town in the distance. Something between them had decidedly shifted toward an unexplored area, and it fazed her.

The feeling was strange and she couldn't quite decipher it. In their two days long wordless intermission, driven by her shocked stupor following their fight she hadn't realized how easy it was sometimes to just let herself flow with whatever light conversation he might have the mood to keep up. Rippner had a certain communication style which, on the surface, was all offensive, ironical and wry, sometimes not devoid of a hint of gloat and patronizing superiority – in the beginning it made her retire into her shell and try to ignore him, it was all she could do to stop herself from clawing his eyes out. After a few days, though, she suspected there weren't always venomous intentions to hurt her behind his words- or so she chose to think- and simply his humor was just as twisted and bordering insufferableness as his personality was. Rarely, his sarcasm would do a funny U-turn and change into mild self-irony that she pretty much enjoyed until he realized the slip and managed to gain the upper hand even then. When she was in a less sensitive mood, she was a perfect match for this type of communication and could return his teasing in kind. As much as she was reluctant to admit, it could be fun sometimes.

And that's what disturbed her the most.

: :

They were making lazy detours all around Missouri, casually visiting a fine string of towns and sights like they had all the time in the world. For the time being, they, in fact, did have.

It was also a period of shift in their personality or daily behavior: other people might have called it domestication or accommodation, they preferred not to call it anything, as a matter of fact, neither recognized these subtle changes.

In the middle of rural Missouri, many miles from any signs of civilization, Lisa had to defeat her inhibition and, as the victim of a too large caffe latte, go to pee by the road in a ditch, for several minutes trying to find the best spot where she would not be seen. Took the shower gel and a bottle of water with her, too, to rinse her hand, and Rippner smirked, looking in the rearview mirror at the top of her head in the tall grass. The cleanliness-freak; in their last motel she had gone crazy, _accidentally_ stumbled upon the cleansing supplies and detergents in the hallway and cleaned their bathroom. Maybe as a compensation for playing the cleaning lady, she happened to leave with a Hawthorne novel she had found on a bookshelf in the reception area of the motel. Of course, he couldn't resist commenting on it.

"So model citizen Lisa Reisert stole a book from a motel?" he smirked but there was nothing offensive in his voice.

Lisa glared at him, trying to come up with a good enough explanation on her defense, then pretentiously stated. "I didn't steal it, just forgot to put it back."

"Uhum, that makes a huge difference."

"Some steal people, I steal books," she remarked with a hint of challenge and Rippner laughed.

"Books are less trouble. I might change profile." After a short silence, he asked softly. "You still consider yourself a hostage?"

She tilted her head to the side and watched him with a curious look on her face. "Shouldn't I?"

He could do nothing but shrug.

In Saint Joseph, so they wouldn't occupy four washing machines at the Laundromat, they were pliant enough to mix only their jeans and dark clothes together and use one machine for the pieces in the same color range, all the other clothes were out of question in that aspect, and went in separate machines. Even that was a huge step for both of them – domestication, again: they simply called it practicability. While the washing program was running, Lisa dragged them to check out a psychiatric museum nearby, showing great and morbid interest in the equipments and premises – Rippner paid her back a previous joke by bantering and inquiring if she felt at home.

In a nostalgia village near Jefferson City, Lisa felt the unexplainable urge to buy a steel-grey poodle skirt Rippner had to outright laugh at, and she laughed in return when he put on a pair of ugly red John Lennon sunglasses. Her smile died instantly, though, as he tried on some very cool looking aviator sunglasses and flashed her a self-satisfied cocky grin that made a pretty disturbed Lisa roll her eyes and turn away instead, and rummaged through the junk, eventually coming up with a vintage-looking pack of candy cigarettes for him. An old truck driver smelling of cheap tobacco and fatty hamburger hit on her persistently while she was waiting for Rippner outside the shop, and she fought off the advances awkwardly but amused at the clumsily chivalrous attempts. She could tell by the look on Rippner's face that he'd been watching the show for a while before taking pity on her and returned, chewing at the end of a candy cigarette.

"Tired of my company?" he quipped as they strolled back to the Bentley, and winked at her.

: :

On Route 65 toward Arkansas, they made a post-lunch stop at a service station to refuel. Above the horizon, a thick blanket of dark blue clouds was approaching rapidly, and the gust of wind it sent forth was cold and wet. Lisa ventured to the edge of the parking lot and stared into the distance while Rippner was idling in the station shop.

There were two trailers in the lot, carrying two families clad in thick jackets and hiking boots, obviously heading to one of the national forests nearby. They were noisily hauling their newly-bought supplies in the trailers. Apart from them and a red Pontiac that just pulled in the lot, the station was empty.

As Lisa stretched her legs with strained movements, she caught the snatches of a dialogue on the other side of a petrol pump.

"I tell you it was him in Ozark. He has the creepiest eyes, man. I tell you that, the guy is lunatic. You should hear what they say…"

The end of the sentence was carried away by the wind and the distance as they walked away from her but it was all Lisa needed. Alarmed, she tried to judge if the conversation she'd just eavesdropped could be something completely innocent and had nothing to do with them, but a gut feeling told her otherwise. The description matched Rippner anyways. Especially the lunatic part. And that they had stopped in Ozark for lunch confirmed her suspicion even more.

Lisa peeked around the pump and spotted two men clad in jeans and bomber jacket. They stationed themselves in front of the store, keeping a watchful eye on the entrance. It didn't take a genius to guess they were bounty hunters.

Quickly, Lisa went back to the car to extract one of Rippner's knives from the laptop bag, and without thinking crept to the Pontiac. With her heart in her throat, she peered out from the cover of the car. They weren't paying attention: casually leaning against the wall and looking unsuspicious, the men were smoking at the entrance, obviously waiting for Rippner to emerge. As she pushed the blade to the tilt in the left rear wheel, she realized, though Rippner was armed, catching him by surprise they could easily defeat him.

With nerves in knots, she frantically searched for something she could make use of but with numb mind she nervously realized she had no idea what to do, how to warn him without exposing herself – if they had seen Rippner, they surely had seen her with him. Through the open door of the shop, she couldn't see him; at least, if she could wave him warningly, that might be enough. She was on the verge of screaming in frustration as a school bus turned in from the highway and parked next to a gasoline pump, and preschool-aged kids were swarming the place in a minute.

Driven by despair and a decidedly dubious- and stupid- idea, she walked up to a group of waist-height boys and smiled at them.

"Hi, I'm Lisa. We have a promotion. The first who finds out the favorite Star Wars character of the two men at the entrance gets a free action figure in the shop. Go and have a try."

Actually, she was surprised that it did the trick. Within ten seconds a dozen of six-year-olds were gathering around the stunned men, shouting names of different Star Wars characters, and Lisa, hiding behind a pump, finally made eye contact with Rippner. He either perceived the commotion and interpreted it in the right way or simply could discover the alarm in her gaze even from that distance and obeyed her frantic waves that motioned him out of the shop, anyhow, with light but energetic steps he rushed through the open entrance, skirting the crowd at the door.

Her distraction granted him only a five-yard head start before he was spotted, but it was enough. By the time the hunters pushed through the mass of enthusiastically shouting children, Rippner was barreling across the lot at full speed. He was fast, in his movements effective and effortless. Lisa dived in the Bentley and threw herself across the seats to open the driver's side door for him.

Suddenly, the loud bang of a gunshot rang through the air. As Rippner slouched and pulled down his head, Lisa let out a horrified yelp, thinking he was hit. Only when he ducked in beside her, did she relax. He hardly jumped in and slammed the door shut when his hand already slipped the key in the ignition with a collected, precise move that Lisa envied him pretty much, and the engine hummed into life. Stepped on the accelerator and the Bentley jumped forward. One of the bounty hunters was straddling at the edge of the lot, holding a gun with two hands, and Rippner reached out and pushed her head down behind the dashboard. The second shot was aimed better but it only grazed the metal polish of the hood, making Rippner curse loudly; Lisa suspected, more out of annoyance about the damage than the fact that he was shot at. He swirled the Bentley out of the lot and onto the state road.

Lisa sat back in her seat, craning her neck to check the road behind them. He snapped his eyes at the rearview mirror, watching the red Pontiac falling in behind them. "Bounty hunters?"

"No, the tax authority."

He smirked and changed gears. "What the hell happened?"

"I lied to those poor kids," she whined, and his smirk widened.

"I'm sure you're going to hell for that."

"Right behind you, right?"

"Nah, hand in hand, but surely not now," he stared at the Pontiac intently and yanked the wheel to the left to pass a slower car in their lane. The motors of the Bentley went from purring to whirring as he floored the pedal, and the car jumped slightly as it gained more speed. The Pontiac, though it wasn't a match for the Bentley, came after them relentlessly.

"Are they lagging behind yet?" frowned Lisa worriedly, looking in the wing-mirror, measuring the distance and the speed of the other car.

"Why would they?"

"Because I pierced their tire."

Rippner looked at her for a good second, a bright smile spreading over his face. In that minute his mind red flagged her as important, whatever it meant. "You're a real gem, you know that?"

To her utter misery, she knew she actually blushed.

Soon the weather confirmed that this time the forecast had been accurate because the next minute heavy raindrops landed on the windshield, and soon the wiper started a frantic battle against the downpour. On the slippery concrete, the Pontiac suddenly swerved to the side and with screeching tires came to a halt.

"That's our cue," said Rippner blithely, watching the scene in the mirror. "Time to test the full speed of the car. Hope we won't get stopped for speeding."

"Oh, God," Lisa clutched at the door, at the seatbelt and anything within reach as Rippner vigorously exceeded the speed limit.

"Your stunt gives us a few minutes advantage."

"On a completely straight road," she moaned grimly.

The remark had barely left her lips when he whirled the wheel sharply to the right and directed the car onto a dirt road. They barreled across potholes that filled with water in record time, making the ground slippery. The ride on the uneven surface jostled them around in the car, making their teeth clatter.

"Shouldn't we turn…?" Lisa chanced, still shaken by the events, but was cut short by a particularly huge bump.

Behind the curtain of the rainfall Rippner could make out the outlines of a sporadic group of trees. Those would hide them, not that anything beyond fifty yard could be easily spotted in the storm. On the irregular surface of the road, the car jolted heavily and he clutched at the wheel, pressing his lips into a thin line. As much as he could see in the wavering light of the headlight, the road beyond the grove split in two, maybe three, and he chose the one that led to the left, keeping them in the cover of the trees from the highway. After a good five minutes' drive, the ground started to feel like an infinite sea of mud.

"This place is a damn swamp."

"Whose smart idea was to come this way? Oh, wait, I remember: yours!"

Smartly, he decided to leave the comment unanswered. The world around them turned dark grey as the storm attacked with full force, and the sun somewhere beyond the thick clouds descended under the horizon – at least, that's what he managed to conclude by taking a look at the clock on the dashboard. As far as he could tell, no one followed them, though in such weather condition it would have been a miracle if anyone could pull that through. As an eardrum-cracking thunder resounded outside, he hoped grimly that with luck the FBI's tracking device on the undercarriage he had retrieved in Illinois would not survive the adventure.

Then the car swung violently to the side, shifted in a ditch, and with bellowing motors it stopped moving. As the wheels span and twirled against the mud uselessly, sending sputters of dirt everywhere, it turned out they not only stopped but stuck, too.

"So much for the four-wheel drive," Rippner muttered, and lifted his foot off the pedal. "We have a situation."

"Wow, peachy. I told you not to go Dakar Rallying here."

"This remark helps the situation just perfectly now."

"Maybe it doesn't, but it means whatever has to be done, I'm staying in the car."

Sighing, he twisted in the seat and looked at her in the meager light of the dashboard. "I can't pull it out alone, Leese. But if you enjoy being stuck here, fine with me. We can wait for the rain to stop and the ground to dry. In the meantime we may play Twenty Questions, or start to psychoanalyze the biggest issues of your life."

"Oh, good idea. The biggest happens to be a five-foot-eight issue right now."

Rippner scowled at her. "Five-foot-nine."

"Oh, really? Could have bet it's less."

"I might as well just kick you out of the car," he grumbled, and unbuckled his seatbelt. "Let's go, Leese."

Innocently, she smiled. "All right, move over. You go out and push the car, I switch on the ignition."

Very unhappily, he unzipped his sweater, took it off so at least it wouldn't be wet, opened the door and peeked out. It _was_ a swamp. As he trudged in the mud to the back of the car, Lisa moved over to the driver's seat and started the engine.

The next minutes were the variation of sounds: the continuous splattering of the rain disturbed by the shriek of the wheels exerting themselves to pull the car out of the pothole, and the horrible thunders that made Lisa cringe with fright. They were pretty much stuck, and the tires dug an even deeper ditch beneath the Bentley. In the end, Lisa brought herself to leave the confines of the car, and exactly when a blinding white light and a deafening cracking filled the air around them, the car lurched forward. Unfortunately, Lisa lurched with it, too. Out of surprise at the sudden movement, and shock as she realized a lightning had just struck a nearby tree and inflamed it, she fell on her knees.

Rippner got around the car cautiously and helped her up. They were both drenched to the skin. In the feeble light of the car and the blazing tree nearby, her eyes were dark, smoldering with alarm and anger. Her pants were muddy up to the knees, her hair a complete mess, and her teeth seemed chattering from cold.

In all honesty, she looked like crap but his heart skipped a beat because exactly for this reason she was so _real_.

For someone like him, the normalcy, ordinariness of the moment, of her, was some kind of a curio. He'd met far too many pretty women, would-be models, wanton girls, sitting at the counter in a smoky bar with perfect make-up, perfect hairdo, showing a perfect segment of their lives, nothing too deep, nothing too complex, and it was all he ever needed. He'd never wondered how they would look like on a tedious weekday or what they would wear on a lazy, lonely Sunday evening. He didn't care: their spotlessness at the moment was all that mattered, the surface, the gloss, even if it was a lie, a temporary perfection, and he became the part of these perfect fractions. Never stopped to doubt if it was fine this way or if it could be any other way. Or if he wanted something completely different.

With Lisa, it was all mundanity from day one. In fact, the only times he would see her with a veneer of impeccability were at her work, and he soon found he hated those moments, the fakeness of her semblance that never before had evoked such resentment even if he had sensed someone was a feigner – and he was always good in sensing it; frankly, those he'd chatted up were all feigners, he deliberately chose them, otherwise he would have disappeared like a shot: he despised their fakeness so it was a morally easy game: he came, saw and conquered, then just left without trace, without regret, without any emotional attachment whatsoever. It was all unquestionably alright till Lisa came along.

She didn't turn out to be the woman he imagined when he'd been tailing her and wasn't the woman he got to know on the plane. The real Lisa was somewhere in between, three-dimensional and full of things that had contradictory effects on him, and he was reluctant to accept the feelings she evoked; almost dreaded their existence, their suspected intensity.

He studied her utterly normal life with the curiosity of an extraterrestrial creature, and found himself surprisingly drawn to it. And now that he could watch her from a ringside seat, reveled in the knowledge that he'd seen her every way. He'd seen her ways only very few people had. He'd seen her without the people-pleaser mask, without her guarded demeanor, without being daddy's girl, angry, dirty, terrified, exhausted, hungry, in tears… and laughing, lolling, enraptured, satisfied. He'd been watching her sleep, dry her hair, nurse a blister, draw nonfigurative shapes on the misted up window – all those little moments she had always kept to herself but now they were his, too. And in his egotistical mind braced with the undeniable obsession he'd grown like a fifth limb, it subconsciously blossomed a belief that it made her his in a way.

He never even stopped to ponder that this reasoning could mean the same thing the other way around.

He hadn't seen her so pissed off, so wound up for a long time. _God, you're unrepeatable_, he smirked at her, and wanted to make the moment permanent and everlasting.

"You cannot get in my car in those muddy clothes," he shouted over the storm tauntingly. "You have to take them off."

She glared at him through the curtain of rain, and went to circle the car to the passenger side. He could read her lips muttering. "You ass."

"I'm not kidding."

As she brushed past him, Rippner grabbed her shoulder. Lisa whirled around to shrug his hand off and as she pushed at him, they slipped. With a disgusting, wet thud he landed on his back, and not too elegantly she fell on him. Rippner, completely breathless and pleasurably short of words, blinked at her; Lisa, sheepishly, with wariness and astonishment, blinked back. The rain beat her back mercilessly, drops from her hair dripped on his cheeks, nose, on his parted lips. For a moment, they both seemed to have lost connection with their motor systems. Then assessing his clothes, the pulp of mud around his torso, she broke out in devilish snickering, wiped her hands in his shirt and jumped off of him. She actually had the nerve to laugh out loudly, though only the shaking of her shoulders made it apparent as the storm drained out her voice. She didn't wait for him to recover.

By the time she reached the other side of the car, though, he was on his feet, tore up the door and leant in. Lisa was rendered motionless as straightening, not bothering with the cold, lightning and rain, not even with her watching him above the roof, he started to strip. She was glad she couldn't see him properly in the dark and cover of the Bentley. First he pulled off his shirt, wiped his hair in its cleaner side, and with a careless movement, threw it on the ground. When he started to peel off his pants, Lisa turned away and fished out a pair of jeans for herself. With their backs to each other, they changed, half-sitting in the relative cover of the car. Luckily, her shirt was only wet, not muddy, so while he pulled back on his sweatshirt, she wrapped herself in a blanket, and closed the door.

Rippner started the engine and acknowledged with satisfaction that the car managed to proceed. Ruffling his hair and sending cold droplets around the interior, he shook his head.

"You know, I just wanted to ask you to sit on a blanket instead of the seat cover."

"Well, you could have told me that instead of being a jerk."

"I'm surprised you changed eventually."

"Only because-" she stopped abruptly, wishing she could come up with a good enough ending but he was too perceptive.

"Because I changed, too?" his smirk was particularly annoying now. "If you wanted me to strip, why didn't you just tell me that?"

"Oh, you self-conceited ass."

He had an expression as if she just told him something very flattering.

"All right, get the map and check where we should go."

"Oh, why haven't I thought of that before?" she drawled, and made a show of looking out the window. "Where are we right now? Oh, yeah, at the corner of Dirt road and No Name street. Easy peasy."

"Argh, Leese," he groaned, fighting for the control over the car as it kept slipping on the road. "Just check if there is anything we are heading now, which is west, southwest."

They navigated through the land for a good half hour before the rainfall became thinner and they could finally catch a glimpse of faint lights of passing cars in the distance.

"First thing in the morning I take it to a car wash," Rippner grumbled, merging onto the road with visibly relaxed muscles.

Lisa only rolled her eyes. "Oh, yeah, your precious car."

Actually, the Bentley was beautiful, moonlight grey with burnt oak interior and black leather seats. It smelled new, and she was sure it just rolled off the assembly line.

"Do you have any idea how much it cost?"

"You mean how many lives?"

A little frown appeared on his forehead as Rippner sucked in his lower lip and thought. It seemed like a lifetime ago, though it happened only this year; a few days before New Year's Eve he received a new task that, though sent through various channels to maintain the anonymity of the client, was presumably a commission from a Syrian or Iranian source, maybe straight from the very top: it took him almost two months to plan and carry out the murder of a Lebanese businessman and ex-Prime Minister, and camouflage it, more fitting in that area, as a suicide bombing. The frown became deeper as he contemplated the memories; now as he looked back at it, the beginning of the year foretold how it would continue: after a bad start, it just got horrible as he was forced into completing assignments he had reservations about, and became outright disastrous with the Keefe case. This was the first time, first year it occurred to him that something was probably off with the whole picture. Of course, his newfound moral reservations weren't grave enough to make him refuse anything. It was his job, other people pulled out carious teeth, he removed people who were in the way of others, simple as that. No, they weren't grave enough but they spoiled it for him. _I do my part, move on._ It slowly became a mantra he'd repeated it so many times, and terribly sounded like he wanted to convince himself of it. Up to meeting Lisa personally, the thought hadn't formed in his head but seeing his own reflection in her eyes, in her repulsed expression, it became clear before him that even repeating it till eternity would never make it sound right. Not that he wasn't able to move on: that was what he was the best in – discarding emotions, even failures from weakness was as easy for him as throwing out yesterday's newspaper. Or at least, it had been so far.

Though her question was rhetorical, he answered it nonetheless, maybe to pay his respect in this twisted way. "Actually, only Rafiq Al-Hariri's."

"Oh, God. You are horrible," Lisa moaned with a pallor face, and turned away, drawing as close to the door she could.

The name was somewhat familiar but she couldn't have told for the life of her who the man was; assumably someone important somewhere in the Middle-East. She was sure if she had paid closer attention to world news, surely would have heard about the assassination, and it made her cringe: the fact that if she happened to google the name, it would result in a bunch of news of his surely violent death that she could tie to Rippner. Somehow, hearing the name of a victim made his whole profession even more depressing and real.

"How could you get involved in a job like this?" Her voice sounded almost desperate even to her ears, so she decided to take a different direction in the conversation. "One mistake and it costs your life. How would you want something so extreme? You knew the conditions, right? Were you tired of living?"

"No."

"So?"

Rippner didn't answer, just eyed her reticently. Lisa rolled her eyes disgustedly.

"Oh, yeah. You thought _you_ wouldn't do a mistake, right? Jesus, I know it's a shock for you but you're still a human!"

"The botched assignment wasn't that much of a problem. Being caught by the fucking police was!"

Crossing her arms under the blanket, she huffed. "Still, it's stupid."

"Thanks for worrying about me. I feel honored," his smirk wasn't very honest this time, wavered at the corners as he sensed her worsening mood.

"Worried, my ass. I just wanted to… tried to…" With an incredulous moan, she stopped abruptly. "What am I thinking? I would _never_ understand how someone would put their life on the line to kill for money."

This was when the second call came.

"Yeah?" answered Rippner, and Lisa retreated in her blanket even more as she listened to him intently. "Missouri or Arkansas, I'm not sure. Greenbrier? I know. Yeah. Uh-huh. There, at noon, Okay, it's settled then."

Though the pre-phone call minutes hadn't been the most harmonious, those following it seemed to bring the Ice Age in the car. Rippner was like a bent bow, the overstrained string of an instrument that could snap someone's eyes any minute, shoulder muscles taut with tension.

Nervously, chewing at the corner of the blanket, she mumbled. "Why does Keefe want this man? It must be some average bad guy, the world is full of them."

Rippner looked over at her, for a moment a bit unfocused as she interrupted his train of thoughts quite abruptly. "He got it in his head that it's someone close to him. He's secretly monitoring everyone at DHS now, and even in other government departments."

Lisa was confused. "But I heard those launching the missile were Russians."

"It doesn't mean the customer is Russian, too. They were taken in to mislead the authority. We usually do that, employ operatives of various nationality and ethnic groups. It never is the client who appoints the people to carry out a task but the Company."

She glanced at him darkly. It didn't pass unnoticed that in most cases he was still using present tense regarding his job as if he was still part of the organization, and she resented this involuntary habit.

"So you meet your boss tomorrow?"

"_We_ meet."

That was, in fact, the last thing Lisa craved for at the moment. Somehow she dreaded the meeting more than she had the one with Michele. After all, about the Italian man she didn't know anything but the next day she had to face someone who, without doubt, was part of this mysterious, horrible organization Rippner had worked for, and her stomach turned stone at the mere thought of it.

As if sensing her reluctance, he asked. "Having second thoughts?"

She disregarded the question. "What will happen tomorrow?"

"We talk. You're not planning anything stupid, right?"

She ignored the twitching muscle in his jaw and pushed on with the questions. "How will you convince him to take you back?"

"By finding the right words. What exactly is your problem right now?"

"What if he wants you to kill me?"

There was a heartbeat-long silence, a cold, deadly silence before he snapped. "Do you ever answer a question with anything other than another question?"

"Do you ever give a straight reply to a question, not an evading one?"

"Depends what you consider straight."

"Ugh, let's give it another try: what will you do if he wants you to kill me?"

"For fuck's sake, quit the damn questions already."

"Well, here we go again."

"You know what? I might just kill you right now and answer the question with that. Good enough?"

With a random thought, she snapped. "I want to call my father."

Rippner gritted his teeth. A very definite migraine was forming between his temples. "You call no one, understood?"

"I haven't heard of him for almost two weeks!"

"Ooh, you miss daddy?" he whined with an irritating high-pitched voice, then barked at her. "Why don't you tell it to someone who gives a shit?"

She unbuckled her seatbelt with an angry snap. "Stop this piece of shit then. I want to get out."

"You might want to stay quiet instead."

He grabbed her arm violently before she could repeat her previous stunt and jump out of the moving car. For a brief minute he wondered what the hell got into them and made them fly at each other's throats. From his part, her last question caused an unexpected turbulence in his chest: it wasn't that he didn't want to give her a proper reply; the problem was much more grave and plain: if he really was ordered to kill her, he wasn't sure he could make himself to do it.

For the time being, Lisa obeyed just because she was distracted by him changing lanes then exiting the state road seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and directing the car toward the neon sign of a roadside motel.

"We are staying here? What if your bounty hunter buddies happen to find us?"

"They won't."

"You can't be sure. They found us back in Missouri, too. And you haven't even noticed them following us."

"Jesus Christ." He groaned out of frustration and anger too, because he knew she was right. It had been a huge mistake, almost a fatal one if it wasn't for her – and it made him even more pissed. His watchfulness had loosened in the previous few days; it was uncharacteristic of him, and blamed it on her for his own sake. He pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine.

"We should stay somewhere less exposed."

"Would you just shut up for one freaking second?' he hollered at her, finally losing it, and slammed the heel of his hand against the wheel.

He burst out of the car, and in the spitting rain dashed into the motel. Lisa lingered behind, keen on keeping distance. Within a few minutes, still fuming if the edginess around his lips was any indication, he came back and hauled his luggage out of the car, leaving Lisa to deal with hers alone.

Up at their room, he unlocked the door, took off his completely muddy shoes inside the entrance and threw his bag in the middle of the room, placing the laptop bag on the table. He didn't spare a single glance at her or whether she was following him, with angry strides strolled toward the bathroom when her appalled voice stopped him.

"This is a double bed room!"

Rippner stared at the bed. He, indeed, in the fit of anger had forgotten to ask for a twin bed room and was automatically given a double bed by the indifferent little dork at the reception. He knew how Lisa hated to stay in the same room with him, how uncomfortable it made her, and he took his revenge on her for the endless questions, for everything in the previous weeks by dropping the remark. "They don't have twin bed rooms here."

It was a lie but so obvious, so transparent that it didn't constitute as a lie in his eyes, and it was clear Lisa thought the same. Before she could protest, he slammed the bathroom door shut.

Shaking with anger and nervousness, Lisa jumped to the table and searched through the laptop bag for the cell phone he had slipped in there. She could go out in the hallway, call her father and be done with it before he would stop her. She needed something as reassuring and kind as her father's voice in the middle of her emotional storm.

"What the hell are you doing?"

Lisa yelped at the sudden voice behind her, and swirled around to face him. He was standing in the bathroom door, sockless, with a towel in his hand. The toilet was still flushing, providing the only sound in the room. The anger in Rippner's eyes was half-tamed and seeped into his features as he measured her. As he spotted the bag, her hands hidden behind her back, he leapt to her but Lisa had stood on guard and darted around the table to evade him. With the cell in her hand, she glared at him.

"I'm calling my father."

"You're not calling anyone."

A very brief and under different circumstances could have been called funny chase began around the table before Rippner caught her by the back of her shirt, and while she delivered a blow with her elbow into his stomach, he tore the phone out of her grip and sent it flying across the room. It landed safely on the bed. Lisa, like a dog spotting its prey, dashed toward it and another fierce struggle unfolded.

Neither of them stopped to muse on the unreasonable, sudden change in their mood. The pent-up tension that had been gathering ever since they had run into the hunters at the gas station reached its climax now, and the only way they could release it was by lashing out at each other.

Eventually, with a death grip around her upper arm, he backed her up against the wall, and they snarled at each other like two rabid wolves.

"Why do I always have to go physical to make you follow my orders?"

She felt the prick of a knife at her clavicle, and puckered her face cynically. "Why do I have to get violent to remind you not to use a knife against me?"

"Violent?" he snorted with a condescending sneer. She had the glimmer of champions in her eyes, and smiled deliciously as he sensed the pressure of a hard object against his waist. Puzzled, he glared down, and laughed incredulously, devoid of humor.

"With my own damn gun? I hate guns. They're messy."

Now she was incredulous. "Says the man with a knife."

They stood still as Rippner assessed her. He bit his lower lip, sucked it in and slowly released it; her gaze dropped at it, the angry red bruise where he'd chewed at it. She had to tear her gaze away forcefully. From under half-closed eyelids he was searching her eyes. And pushed the tip of the knife delicately.

"Pull the trigger, Leese."

She raised an eyebrow. "Tired of living, Rippner?"

He leant in the gun. With his face only a few inches from hers, he looked incredibly smug. "It's empty, Leese."

Just a nanosecond of flicker; she just as smugly smiled back at him. "Are you sure?"

A twitch around his eyes, a moment of uncertainty betrayed him, and her heart jumped around joyously at the sight of it. The wariness gave a deeper shade of blue to his eyes as his pupils grew slightly. He bent over her nonetheless, so close that his eyes became almost blurry.

"You can't shoot shit."

"Funny remark from someone with a bullet wound in the side."

"Your aim sucks. If it wasn't for daddy dearest, you'd be long dead by now."

She frowned at the memory of his hand pulling her head back by her hair; he'd dropped the knife back then and she never stopped to wonder what exactly he was going to do with her, maybe strangle her with his bare hands. Yes, very probably she had been close to a violent death, and a new wave of anger surged in her chest, suddenly tasting bitter rather than burning white.

She spat venomously. "You're close enough now not to miss. And I've visited the shooting range a few times after the flight."

"Mmh, really?" His voice was barely above a whisper, low and resonating in the close air between them, sending shivers down her spine. "I bet you loved it, loved the current rippling from your fingertips up to your shoulder and right into your chest. The kick when it recoiled and knocked the air out of your lungs. The power erupting from the barrel and filling you at the knowledge that the bullet would rip through anything. Am I right, Leese?"

He was very close now. With his right elbow propping against the wall behind her, he brushed a hand through her hair, and breathed against her hairline. Lisa tried to blink, like a mongoose before a cobra, tried to move aside but there was something enticing in his eyes now. Enthralling in a perishing way like a siren's song. Her mind wanted to deny his words but her lips just wouldn't move.

"Come on, Leese. Pull the trigger. I know you want this."

Lisa eyed him, knowing all too well she wouldn't pull the trigger just as much as he wouldn't stab her – both of them knew it. Just a show of control. And then he put away the knife and smiled again, sliding his left hand down on her arm, toward the gun she was still pointing at him, and squeezed her elbow.

"If you shot me now, it'd go through the intestines, if you're lucky enough it would probably hit a kidney. You might want to aim a bit upwards, it can do a lot more damage that way, mangle the stomach, a lung even."

She was frozen, numbed into stony motionlessness. There was something terribly horrific in his calmness, the soft, delicate whisper of his voice, in the way he touched her. Her stomach quivered, telling her to just obey him and end this awful ride he forced her into, and put a safe distance between them again. She flexed her jaw as she felt his lips brush her temple. His physical proximity, the unpredictability of this game set her teeth on edge.

"Why hesitate?" His voice, if he was another man, it'd have been of a lover seducing her to kiss him but the words slurring from his lips were purely bizarre. "Just a flicker of a finger, Leese, and the _despicable repulsive snitch_ would be gone just like that."

She could feel the words against her skin, her own words she'd casted at him in the peak of anger and seemingly they hit him like real hard objects – now they felt so terribly alien to her ears, even unfair a bit. She frowned, and for a lot of reasons her heart wanted to break out of her chest.

"You're fucking insane," she managed, completely rattled.

He laughed, and with that cold sound he broke the spell on her. Without any resistance from her side, he took the gun, clicking the safety lock in place, then tugging the weapon into his waistband.

"You know I've shot you once," Lisa reminded him, still perplexed and a bit unnerved by his closeness as he didn't show any inclination to move away from her.

"That was long ago."

"And you think I wouldn't do it again?"

A smile played on his lips as he contemplated the answer.

"Maybe yes or…" his fingers snaked in her hair affectionately, creeping to the back of her head, pausing there. Gently, he forced her head a bit upwards, making her meet his unusual gaze. Never before had he seemed so intimidating for her. "No, I guess you wouldn't."

"Ever occurred to you that your over-confidence can be your downfall?" she creaked, despising her own wavering voice.

Something flickered in his eyes. He leant in, mouth brushing the tip of her nose, and just when she wanted to push him away, fight him even if she was completely cornered, he pulled her hair and her head snapped up. From a mere inch, she stared at him, petrified. His face contorted into anger. Not contorted, Lisa realized, he'd just dropped the previous mask.

She didn't even suspect it _had been_ his downfall already. She should have known the best. His teeth creaked as he set his jaw. _Thank God, you're fucking blind_, he thought. He didn't like she tried to confront him with well-guessed truths.

"Venturing into my territory? Wanna play my game?"

"Have once defeated you at that," she reminded him boldly.

"Once," a yank, to emphasize his comment, and abruptly, he released her, stepping away. As if nothing unusual had happened, he smoothed his shirt down, and jerked his head toward the bathroom. "Your turn. There are no bars on the window but if you do anything funny, next time you gotta use the bathroom, I'm going with you. If I knock or call you and you fail to answer, I'll break down the door and go in. Understood?"

Lisa glared at him disgustedly, gathered her clothes and barged in, glad for the opportunity to get rid of his company. It wasn't too relaxing, though: true to his words, he checked her in every five minutes, knocking and coaxing a charming conversation ("Leese? Still there?" "Sod off.") out of the situation so in the end she simply wanted nothing but scream.

"Should I check for weapons? Or any messages on the mirror?" he quipped cynically as she left the bathroom and Lisa made a wolfish face as a reply. With a sudden move, he clicked a handcuff on her wrist, and while she was busy shouting at him, he cuffed her to the bed.

"I can't let you make phone calls, now, can I?"

Her voice was dripping with sarcasm. "What an irony."

When Rippner entered the bathroom and his eyes fell on the mirror and a row of block letters written in the condensation, he snorted with a lopsided grin. She, indeed, left a message, a very eloquent one that successfully summed up her opinion: _Fuck you, Jack_.

When he finished, she was still sitting in the same position, with the same scowl on her face as he had left her. He ignored her glares. Stuffed his clothes in the laundry bag, and with natural ease, he got in the bed, arranged his pillow, and turned his back on her. She remained sitting. He could feel her relentless gaze, her hatred pressing against him, and he hid his smile in the pillow.

"What if I strangle you in your sleep?"

Rippner turned to her, an amused look dancing on his face. "With one hand?"

She lifted her chin and shrugged defiantly. Rippner grabbed her free hand and pulled her toward him, putting it on his neck.

"Go ahead."

Lisa couldn't help the whimper her throat emitted. It was an explosion of senses. The first was the stubble on his neck prickling her palm, closely followed by the unexpected softness and warmth of his skin, the calm undulation of the veins drumming against her fingers. As he looked up at her, sideways and upwards, his eyes grew wider, more prominent than usually; the nightstand lamp mixed the blue with lazy orange glint. His smell was the last assaulting her: mixture of shower gel and his own scent.

Her hand flinched, protesting against the sensation, and she pulled it back with a nervous yank.

Overly satisfied, he smirked at her, reached to the lamp and switched it off. For long minutes only his even breathing could be heard. Lisa didn't move, clutched at the headboard and rested her head on her knees.

After a long stretch of silence, Rippner sighed, switched on the light. He cast an annoyed glance at her. Stood up, retrieved the key from the laptop bag and unlocked the cuff.

"Go to sleep now."

Without a word, Lisa slipped under the blanket and pulled it up to her nose, squirming to the very edge of the bed. Irritated, she noticed he wasn't wasting a single inch of his side and sprawled across it comfortably, making it difficult to put a convenient distance between them.

It was unnerving, strange to have to sleep so close to him, the sleep itself an impossible mission. She hated the nights because then she couldn't control what she was doing and she could tell he hated it just as much; and even more the mornings when she would wake up wrinkled, with hair from hell, swollen, sleep-kissed lips and sometimes wet pillow: when she was extremely tired, she would drool in her sleep, and it was embarrassing. Since they both hated being caught off-guard, they would turn away from each other till they could gain a less vulnerable façade. He knew that she was gritting her teeth in her sleep. And she knew how light sleeper he usually was like someone always on the watch: a soldier in the trench. And she also knew quite a few things she had never wanted to know: one morning or two when he would wake up and move to the bathroom in an awkward, tense way, it took her some time to find out the reason. When the realization hit her that he was most probably fighting a morning erection, she needed all her strength not to throw up or jump out of bed and simply run away, even if she knew it wouldn't have necessarily a sexual reason. But when he didn't show any intention to ease it any other way than whatever way he chose in the bathroom, she relaxed. Apart from her father and brother, she'd never really lived together with a man, and it was a very awkward, intimate thing to be aware of such bodily reactions of someone who was emotionally as far from her as possible.

She scrunched up her face: right now, in the same bed with him, it was the last thing she should have recalled.

It was hard to tell how many minutes passed or if it was an hour or half the night. The simple thought of him staying within reach to her drew nervous tears in her eyes. It was only too much now. She was still worked up after the shooting at the gas station, the swamp adventure and the lightning that scared her to death, the impending meeting with his boss and their little fight for control. Her body wanted nothing more than a revitalizing sleep but her mind wouldn't let it. Frowning, she tried to reason with herself, listing pros and cons, analyzing her thoughts. Took a calming breath, and suddenly relaxed. She knew; she knew with a certainty that's existence was surprising enough in itself but the extent of its unwavering strength seemed almost unreasonable that she was safe beside him from _that_ point of view. He wouldn't stoop that low: would hurt her in any form except for that one. How she knew, how she assumed she knew him that much – there was no answer to that.

Rippner could hear her uneven breathing from his side of the bed, felt the tensed muscles under the blanket though they had almost a three feet space between them. He propped up on an elbow and flipped the light on once again. Lisa was staring at the ceiling, from under the blanket only those huge green eyes could be seen, and the tip of her slender nose.

"What is it now?" he asked impatiently.

"I didn't want to wake you."

"In fact, I couldn't even fall asleep with your whimpers here."

"I wasn't whimpering!"

"Yeah, right. So care to tell me what's wrong?"

She bit her lip in the cover of the blanker and whispered. "I'm probably afraid a bit."

He squinted at her. "Of me or of something else?"

She glanced over at him, the hint of a smile apparent in her eyes. "Well, to be honest, right now you're not that intimidating. So it leaves me with whoever's after us."

She chose not to mention who was _before_ them. It was safer this way. He didn't have to know about the foreboding she couldn't swallow at the thought of the next day.

Arching an eyebrow, he asked with feigned hurt, unbeknownst to him, emphasizing the boyish look even more. "Right now?"

"With your hair mussed up like that."

"It's only deception." He lay back down. Quiet reigned between them for a minute before he sighed. "Don't worry, Lisa, they won't get us, not tonight."

"How can you be so sure?"

"I just know. Trust me."

In the troubled silence Rippner suddenly realized, with the endless talking and questioning it was her way to handle her anxiety. He squeezed his eyes shut, feeling her gaze on him. He felt a bit bad about yelling at her in the car. She could get on his nerves more accurately and effectively than anyone he'd ever met but it wasn't necessarily her fault. Not always, at least.

"Okay, come here." Without thinking, reconsidering and weighing, he reached out for her and soothingly pulled her closer.

Lisa stiffened but didn't resist, only her brain recoiled from his touch. He put a lazy arm over her shoulder, fingers lightly brushing the curls at the back of her head. For some reason, it reminded her of her father's embrace, reassuring, strong, and her body slacked a bit under the blanket.

"Everything will be alright, Leese."

She curled up on her side, eyes shut and faintly nodded. This time she let her mind believe him. He reached behind him and flipped off the lamp for the last time, and settled back. He could feel how stiff she still was, how she forced herself to fall asleep but misunderstood her tautness.

"I'm a light sleeper, whatever noise is made outside, I'd be jolted awake," he whispered and she sighed.

For long minutes, Lisa was waiting for him to fall asleep so she could retreat a bit to her side but as she was listening to his even, calm breathing, sensing the weight of his right hand fallen on top of her forearm between them, she found it soothing, and slowly, she drifted off, too.

* * *

**A/N:** I have a shitty fanart for this chapter, and a few more to RE, if you are interested, there's a link on my profile page.


	8. Janusfaced truthtellers

**Chapter 8: Janus-faced truth-tellers**

Lisa knew she was a restless sleeper, a real merry-go-round during the night. That's why it was a surprise that when she awoke next morning, she found herself pretty much in the same position as when she'd fallen asleep. As if he wanted to mimic her, Rippner could be her reflection of sorts. That, actually, was the third surprise of the morning.

The second was that she didn't start at his proximity when she opened her eyes.

In connection with it, there was a fourth one, too (as to why she would feel almost comfortable under the same blanket with him), but on that she was reluctant to muse.

It was the round scar on his throat she first caught a glimpse of in the meager morning light, and Lisa smiled a little, steeling herself not to reach out and touch it. She was still in awe of her own brutal act, and wondered if she was still able to repeat it, had it been necessary. Right then, hardly; especially not when Rippner was so innocent-looking and perfectly at ease.

She was lying on her side, facing him, their knees bent and touching. In the makeshift O-shaped space their bodies formed their arms lay on top of one another: a pile of limbs and wrinkled sleeves. If it was possible they were lying there sunk in a blanket of intimacy without- if not completely but on the main level, by all means, deprived of- sensuality: like day-old birds in the nest. She watched him with sudden sadness as he watched her back silently. He was mastering a half-disastrous bed-head with linen-wrinkled face; the half-closed eyelids made his gaze reptile-like, lazy yet intense, his skin so fair and translucent she could make out the map of red-blue capillaries around his eyes; his shirt, the skin of his neck was dream-scented, bed-scented, and for some reason it made her heart ache.

It was the situation of waking up _not_ alone, the implication behind the moment that she'd never assumed she missed: a male body, hard-muscled, hard-boned, masculine-scented, lying beside her, to feel the slight pressure, the weight of it against her own. Now that she was reminded of the feeling, Lisa rediscovered something that hadn't long appeared on her daily sustenance list, and with some kind of grief it dawned on her that she would most probably miss it.

Rippner rubbed his fingers lightly, playfully over her knuckles, and she squinted at him lazily in response: that was how they started the day.

It was a comforting, calm moment between them, but Lisa couldn't help the feeling that it was their last before the storm already gathering on the horizon would wipe it away.

: :

By the time they got to the predetermined diner in Greenbrier, Arkansas after a good three-hour drive, they'd fallen in complete and, from Lisa's side somewhat troubled, from Rippner's it was rather contemplating silence. After he parked the car right in front of the huge glass display, occupying a slot he would have the best vantage point at from inside, and they got out still without a word, Lisa grew incredibly tense. This time there was no briefing from his side, he didn't even warn her to behave as a hostage or shut the hell up and fear him like a trembling duckling, and though she always hated when he did so, this time it added yet another weigh on her heart. If it wasn't enough, she could feel him distance himself from her, but as they walked toward the entrance and he practically stuck to her like a leech, Lisa amended her observation that the deliberate distance was only emotional and mental, not physical. The composed coldness of his behavior, the way he didn't even seem to have inclination to look at her hurt Lisa more now, after days of slow and tentative, with the lack of better words, warming up toward each other – which, in fact, meant nothing more than that the urge to strangle the other appeared a bit more seldom than in the beginning. It was a stupid thing anyway, considering that he could be called anything but her comrade, but she felt terribly alone nonetheless.

Reaching the entrance, Rippner opened the door for her, guiding her inside with a palm rested on her lower back just an inch below the line where it could be neutral; he ventured into the territory of possessive gestures, it had 'she's mine' written all over it, and Lisa took up a quicker pace to shake his hand off. Once inside, he took a quick, stealthy glance around, and frowning, strode to an empty booth somewhere in the middle. He motioned her to take the seat by the window, while he sat facing the entrance and having a good look at the Bentley and the parking lot beyond it.

Apparently, his boss was yet to show up but as Lisa peeked at the clock above the counter, she could see they had still almost ten minutes till noon.

Nervously, Lisa pushed the saltshaker an inch to the right, placed it exactly on a stain on the table. Tilted it, twirled between her fingers, then froze and pulled them back when she saw his hands. They were motionless on the tabletop, and with sudden realization she noticed how measured, how thoroughly, utterly calculated his movements always were, not even a flicker of a finger would happen in vain. Most people revealed their anxiety by little unbeknownst acts rooted deep enough to run unnoticed by them. Some would fiddle with an object, a pen, a fork, a thread, some would sweep unseeable crumbs off the table, some would chew their nails. Rippner did none. Everything was subordinated to necessity, efficiency. It was both amazing and frightening how he ruled his own body, how much he was in control of everything he did. She remembered those stories of soldiers programmed to kill. Was he running on a similar program? She shuddered. It could be.

Then she looked closer. Looked and smiled.

The only thing that gave him away eventually was the even more alert, taut, unblinking gaze he was casting around casually, his eyelids rigid as if he couldn't move them. She knew in any minute he would smooth back his hair before the tresses would fall back in his forehead again, and she couldn't suppress a smile when he actually did so. Another telltale sign. It was good to know he was cursed with involuntary human habits, too. Lisa was somehow sure no one would tell he was ready to jump any minute, and it surprised her why and when she'd gotten to know him so subtly. It was soothing, though, because it showed he couldn't hide from her so easily. Now it wasn't only he who knew too much, uncomfortably too much of the other.

It was two minutes before noon when an average looking man in his early fifties slipped in their booth so swimmingly that Lisa discerned him only when he was already sitting across Rippner. He was wearing a sandy brown suit with a darker shade of dress shirt. His hair mouse-colored, grey around the ears, eyes light green and had an uninterested look to them, his face longish and somewhat jovial, nose strong. Lisa examined him with a touch of astonishment: for Rippner's boss she would have imagined someone more remarkable; someone with an aura of intimidation around him that would clearly shout how dangerous he was. Looking at this man, she could easily picture him mowing the lawn in the weekend while his wife was making pancakes in the kitchen. They would probably have a Labrador, too.

Her gaze slid from him to Rippner. He was sat a bit upright now, and returned the silent gaze of his ex-boss with a composed posture, though in his eyes Lisa discovered a hint of respect she had rarely seen there – obviously, she thought wryly, she wasn't one to evoke that particular feeling in him.

The moment stretched uncomfortably long for her liking before Rippner broke the silence with a curt nod.

"Thank you for coming."

"You realize I'm going against the rules even by showing up here?" The man's voice had a raspy quality aggravated by a hint of reprimand that made Rippner press his lips together.

"Of course, and believe me I appreciate it."

There was another round of silence which made Lisa fidget on her seat.

"This here is the reason then?" the man asked suddenly, jerking his head toward Lisa without looking her way as if she wasn't even present or didn't deserve the muscle work it took to turn his head. For that she was momentarily glad because the question drew a dark glare on her face that she couldn't hide.

Rippner's jaw flexed, and he, too, refrained from glancing at her. He shook his head rigidly. Lisa could tell he was fighting to utter his next words by the way the muscle in the side of his face kept twitching.

"No, she's nothing special. _I_ was the reason. I was too arrogant, my attention wavered and she used it against me. The highest price I've ever paid for a mistake," he added bitterly.

"Yeah, a mistake but an epic one. I always told you to cut your ego a bit."

In another situation Lisa would have snickered at the remark but this time she was rendered motionless as Rippner accepted the scolding with stone face. Only his nostrils flared as his pride squirmed in agony.

"I know what you want to say. And you know my answer, Jackson."

"If it was entirely true, you wouldn't be here now," Rippner remarked confidently, and scooped forward, leaning on his elbows. "Yes, I want another chance but I have something to offer."

"Which is?"

"Fixing what I messed up."

There was a sigh from the man's part, and he too, leant forward. "Before you say anything more, tell me how you could organize that ambush on the FBI office from a prison cell?"

Rippner paused visibly. His eyes flicked at Lisa for a fraction of a second before he smiled a bit. "I didn't. Keefe did."

Alarmed, Lisa eyed him warily. Was he telling his boss the truth? As she remembered, according to the cover-up, he was freed by an independent terrorist group for a shitload of money.

"I heard it otherwise," the other man commented with slightly raised eyebrows but his look remained otherwise indifferent.

"I was in a high sec, Henry. There was no way I could achieve it. He arranged it that way to make everyone believe I escaped." Rippner's smile was the pure example of condescension. "Part of his plan. His little plea bargain. He thinks I'm in."

Lisa needed all her strength not to jump up and sprang several questions to him. She wasn't sure what should be said but the conversation had already set her off-balance.

"If Keefe thinks you're on his side, why the police warranty?"

"Part of the game. It makes the setup believable."

"And he wants what? Swooping down on the company?"

"He isn't _that_ stupid. Only on the customer."

"Only," huffed Henry. "And I take you get a nice little new life under the witness protection."

"The mockery of a life, yes," grunted Rippner with pure disgust. "Only a notch better than rotting in a cell."

"What's exactly his plan?"

"I convince the company and the customer to let me finish the job. Then inform you when and where the execution would take place, and you inform the customer who would have a chance to watch it. Keefe sets up a trap. I go there, seemingly kill Keefe, the FBI catches the client," Rippner drawled with a singsong voice, and Lisa scowled at him. He was convincing. For Lisa, he was. Somehow it didn't seem to go the right direction at all.

With a detached expression as if they were bargaining over some cheap rug, the older man inquired. "So what's your offer?"

Rippner's voice was just as emotionless. "Keefe. Dead. Really dead, of course."

"Care to tell me how you'd do it?"

"Simple. He trusts me. I meet him and accomplish it. Would be a piece of cake. Far too easy, actually."

With troubled mind Lisa was trying to find out if it was meant to happen this way, if Keefe would approve the method Rippner was using to persuade his boss. By telling the truth about his escape or the existence of the plea bargain, he unsettled her, and with his confident offer to take Keefe's life she became badly confused.

She could tell Rippner was overly satisfied with himself as he casually changed his posture and folded his arms over his chest with a confident glint in his eyes. Henry had most probably sensed it too, because with narrowed eyes he scowled at him.

"And what makes you think the customer wants him dead? Or anyone at all? You know pretty well, situations always change."

Rippner fell back in his previous post, placing his elbows back on the table, and stole another glance, this time clearly amused, at Lisa.

"Somehow he knows the client is in his political vicinity. He is monitoring everyone in governmental spheres. Sooner or later he would find something. I don't think the client would feel safe knowing this."

Lisa stared at him in disbelief. There was no way in hell Rippner was allowed to share this intelligence with his boss. And suddenly, through the haze of her reluctance, through her feeble, half-born trust in him, through the calmness of the last days, the memory, the fact of his exquisite ability to manipulate anyone around him emerged and the picture was finally pieced together. He cheated everyone: Keefe, Alvarez, her. He'd been nervous before this encounter but not of what she'd assumed, not because he was unsure if he would be able to convince his boss to take him back and thus set Keefe's plan in motion. He wanted to be taken in for himself. For real. All he ever wanted was to be back in business; even his use of present tense when he would talk about his job indicated it.

Before she could stop herself, an astound hiss escaped her lips. "You…"

For the first time ever since they had entered the diner, Rippner looked at her squarely and Lisa shrank away from his sardonic, emotionless gaze. For a second, her heart seemed to stop beating in her chest, then dashed forward with rapid drumbeats.

"Come on, Leese. You really thought I'd go along with that pathetic plan?"

"You… you ..." in her misery her mind froze and couldn't spit out a good enough adjective to describe him. Rippner laughed at her drily, and his cold voice hurt her more than the words rolling from his lips.

"What a wide vocabulary. You should cut it out, Leese, you're just ridiculing yourself," he jeered at her. To the boss, said dismissively. "Just ignore her."

His utter petulance rattled her, and Lisa made a desperate, rather instinctive movement to stand up, though she was wedged between the window and the table, but Rippner grabbed her by the elbow and kept her in place.

"Don't even think of it," he snarled, and the flashing in his eyes told her he was ready to regulate her by any means. The feeling was horrible, it felt like he had headbutted her again, only this time her eyes didn't close, only her mind shut down. She couldn't decide who she was angrier at: him or her. Somehow along the line, she forgot how repulsive, how vile and despicable he actually was. _Who_ exactly he actually was.

Lisa barely noticed the waitress finally stepping to their table to take their orders. The short conversation didn't register in her mind at all as she stared ahead with a blank look, trying to find her place in the new formula.

She started as she sensed him lean close and with cloyingly silky voice, Rippner nudged her. "You want something, Leese?"

Looking up at the waitress, Lisa shook her head, terrified, because she realized, even if she wanted to, she couldn't escape, couldn't even move her legs. It hurt, the disappointment, her own stupidity that along the line, against all reasoning, she started to trust him. She stared helplessly at the woman, her only chance for help at the moment, trying to make her see her misery, that something was off, that this man beside her was the one on the news but the next minute brought the same impotent numbness she would feel whenever Rippner switched on his charming-deceptive mode – somehow it always worked flawlessly, outshining whatever feeble attempts she chanced. Obviously noticing the waitress' vague interest in Lisa's state, still sleekly, he smiled at her with his usual by-the-book amiable smile that made Lisa's stomach convulse with disgust.

"Just bring her a glass of water, please. She's just received some bad news, and she's still shaken a bit."

As they were left alone, he hissed at her. "Way to go, Leese. Try not to draw attention."

Lisa tossed her head: it was the red eye all over again, the same roles, same words, and she felt sick, hatred, revulsion and anger flaring up in her. She could have pierced his eyes with a toothpick if it meant she could ease her own misery.

Henry, who'd been observing the scene with dark curiosity, tilted his head, and with an almost x-ray stare, he queried sharply. "Why do you keep her?"

Flustered, Lisa bit her lips. He made it sound like she was some annoying pet that could be kicked out at any time when the kid got bored of it. Presumably for them, she really was.

Rippner was ready with the answer. "Everyone needs a life-insurance. She's mine."

"Leverage, you mean."

"Why else do you think I'm dragging her across the country?"

There was so much honest irritation on his face that as Lisa peered at him she found it impossible to be faked.

Still unconvinced, Henry gave the younger man a thorough glance. "Are you sure it's worth it? She seems to be a great deal of nuisance."

Flippantly, like even the assumption was an offense for his skills, Rippner shrugged. "I can manage her."

The other man was insistent on the subject. "And if not?"

Rippner's smile told Lisa enough. In its cruelty, it seemed to be conveying his very essence. "She knows the consequences."

They waited silently as the waitress came back with their drinks and placed them on the table. Both men took a sip thoughtfully, only Lisa kept her hands in a stiff cramp of cold fingers, trying to avoid eye contact with either man. There had to be a way out of this but the timing wasn't right at the moment.

"You got yourself in quite a mess, Jackson," Henry commented a shade sadly, and suddenly there was something fatherly in his tone. "You know I always had high hopes in you. You've been one of the best, my personal pride. I've passed on everything I knew. You had a reputation not many had among us at such young age."

Shivering at the thought of what kind of reputation Rippner might have, Lisa, who had pricked up her ears anew, was seeing an inevitable 'but' coming, and apparently so did Rippner, judging by the slight shift to the side he made in the chair.

"But you've become overconfident, cocky, and I kept telling you that'd be your ruination one day." He jabbed a finger at the tabletop with a hint of accusation. "Your continuous success, of course, didn't justify my warnings. Reliable, ruthless, deadly efficient and practical: I specifically recommended you for this case. I've never made such a huge mistake."

Rippner glared at him a bit indignantly for having his abilities questioned. On her end of the table, Lisa was simply nauseated by the row of gruesome attributes.

"It wasn't a mistake. I fucked it up because I had to fuck up something one day. The law of success is that you fail one day."

"And in the worst time."

"There's only worst time in this business, Henry."

For a long, uncomfortable minute that surprisingly unsettled Rippner more than Lisa, Henry simply stared at them with an intense gaze that seemed to pry in their thoughts.

"In a way I feel responsible. If I hadn't stayed so long in Indonesia this summer…"

Rippner was still gruff, clearly displeased by the change of subject, keenly trying to make the conversation as short he could. "What would it have changed? You couldn't be there on the plane. It was my assignment."

"I'm talking about the time _before_ the plane, Jackson."

The answer seemed to upset Rippner, and Lisa stared with satisfaction at his tense face, his palms flustered against the table. She wasn't sure where Henry was taking the dialogue but she liked the effect it had on Rippner who chose to remain in silence.

"No one, not a single damn person warned you, and for that I was terribly pissed."

In the almost stunned silence, Rippner fidgeted uncomfortably. The intensity of his glance burnt a hole in the other man's but the message, the warning ("_don't you dare go that way_") in it got seemingly disregarded as Henry returned the glare with his own, much calmer one. The respect that had formed between them in the span of years didn't let Rippner to simply ignore his remarks.

"Michele did," he mumbled eventually, a bit absently, and forced himself to avoid Lisa's gaze who seemed to find unfortunate interest in their exchange. He just wished Henry would shut the hell up finally, and cursed him for behaving like Lisa wasn't there and cursed her for paying attention. But mostly, he cursed himself for the whole surveillance, for not seeing beyond her façade, and still letting himself be intrigued by it.

"Only far too late because you hadn't confided in him earlier. Maybe you were too young to know… There's no logical or healthy explanation on it. I don't say you've been the first but I've never suspected that you of all people would fall into this phenomenon."

"Phenomenon?" Rippner meant to degrade the statement but the word didn't come out as intended and was more of an inquiry than a snort.

"It stretched out far too long. I wish we'd been in contact then. I'd have made them withdraw the assignment from you."

In the heavy silence, Rippner looked away, jaw clenched with anger, frustration, embarrassment as suppressed memories of the faithful summer resurfaced.

Lisa just stared at him, trying to decipher what hadn't been said, adding it to what she'd heard or found out alone. Henry was dropping hints about something she was trying to translate otherwise than it offered on the surface because what it sounded like made her cringe, but these hints and the young Italian girl's remarks from a week before clashed in her mind now, and the puzzle pieces, the vaguely outlined symptoms created a very possible picture. Suddenly, she saw the stalker who up till now had only been plotting horrible schemes in different light. Up to that point, it was all about cold-blooded political and logical game, a matter-of-factly contract between two parties where, unfortunately, she fell into the middle of things but wasn't more than a mean to carry out the plan. The new, monstrous picture revealed a layer beneath the fact-based, cold logic, beneath the utter void of anything human-relating: however Lisa tried, she couldn't _not_ see something frighteningly, humanely unprofessional misshaping the image that'd been valid in her mind. Now that the professional layer got peeled off, she didn't see it intimidating anymore but creepily perverted.

She squinted at Rippner, trying to see him as the man slipping out of his role, out of his normal, indifferent way into something he clearly hadn't been able to control. Had he really looked at her differently, seen her for more than a mean in the play? Could he really be disturbed so deeply, so _sickly_ that it eventually led to his fall? She squeezed her eyes shut, and for a horrible minute she had to fight to separate the mental image in her head, to distinguish him from _the other man_. Her nails sank into the skin of her leg as bile rose from her stomach. Forcing her eyes open and her mind off the roller-coaster ride downward, she attempted to pay attention to the conversation that had continued on a different course.

"You know there is no turning back, Jackson."

"There has to be. You know very well that was my life. Still it is! I can't just simply replace it with something else."

"You know pretty much, Jackson, the rules are rules. You're not the first who's exiled."

At the last word, Rippner visibly winced, and suddenly it was like someone switched the light on within him. His face and gaze became animated and lively, steeled with despair and determination. The change, its rapidity and unpredictability, its simmering intensity was unnerving.

"Just let me prove I'm still useful. I want to be back. I was good, you said it yourself, was one of the best. I still am, dammit. Do you think I'd give it up for some laughable bargain from the government? I was a manager for a reason. Just give me a chance to prove it."

Lisa stared at him in shock. He had an eerie, greedy, sickly enthusiastic glint in his eyes, in his posture as he bent over the table and leant closer to the other man, skin flushed with anticipation and excitement. She felt sick. It was a face she didn't want to see again, the eager face of the assassin from the flight, from the chase in her father's house, full of cold determination. She couldn't spend a second in his company any longer, and felt like suffocating in his presence. All she needed was space to think and pull herself together, but beside him, beside this man from the past she had foolishly buried deep inside, it was impossible.

"I have to go to the bathroom," she blurted desperately.

Rippner gave a slight start as if he'd forgotten she was there, and glared at her with an incredulous snarl on his face.

"Oh, I don't think so." He had to hide his momentary fear that she would do something stupid by gulping down the last sips of orange juice, and he tossed the glass toward her. "You know the drill. The best I can offer."

"This time I feel _sick." _Eying the glass, Lisa emphasized the word, meaning it to convey her opinion about him, and plastered her hand over her throat in a defensive manner. Rippner's nonchalant huff was as condescending as ever.

From his side of the table, Henry watched them with the recognition that the moment had a history between the two. Giving a thorough ministration to Lisa, seeing her with a man's eyes, with Rippner's eyes, recognizing the perpetual fighter, the constant defiance in her gestures, he nodded with understanding enlightenment. She was a challenge, an intriguing, pretty one that, he could imagine, drove the utterly control-freak Rippner to tame and bend her to his liking.

"Now it's partly clear why it happened."

Rippner disregarded the half-joking smile, and took the remark as an offense, clearly misinterpreting it. "You think I'm _that_ amateur? Fucking it up for a pair of doe eyes?"

"You know one day I'd love to hear what exactly happened that made you end up in a hospital half-dead."

Rippner looked away, the frown shrank his eyes to slits. Diagonally from him, Lisa couldn't hide her snickering, and Henry didn't lag behind in perceiving it.

"I think Ms. Reisert would very gladly share her version of the events."

"Anytime."

Lisa's cruel smile vanished slowly as her eyes met Rippner's: they held hers before dropping a foot. She knew he was eying her scar that was hidden behind her clothes, and the insinuation, the secret she definitely wouldn't share with his boss, made her gloating give place to a dismal mood.

Satisfied, Rippner faced his boss. "If you take me back, I might hold a five o'clock tea-party and tell the whole tale."

His cheeky comment elicited a short laugh from Henry, a partly amused one that slowly transformed into a glum head shake. "You know it's not only my decision."

Suddenly, Rippner turned almost timid as he solemnly nodded. Henry's last remark was better than an outright rejection. "I do. All I ask is to consider it."

"I'll call you."

With that, the meeting was seemingly considered over because without another word, Rippner stood from the table, pulling Lisa after him, and walked casually out of the diner, keeping a warning hand on her elbow.

: :

The first ten minutes in the car rivaled in misery those following her kidnap back in Miami. Something in her ached so much that she couldn't keep her eyes open, and sat there slumped against the door like a coal sack. Her own stupidity and inability to stop him petrified her mind. The only coherent thought flashing up in her mind was that Keefe had to know the deal was nothing but a lie. If what Rippner had said was true, and it pretty much seemed so, the politician's life was in danger; if he met Rippner in person, he would serve as an admission ticket for a petty criminal to his old life. She cursed herself for letting him lull her vigilance and suspicion by acting civil (this simple act from someone like him could serve as the eighth wonder of the world, and it had deluded her; now she was able to see it clearly, if too late) – he had to be pretty proud of his achievement; quite a stylish revenge, she had to give it to him.

Beside her Rippner sank in watchful silence, and maybe purely out of cruelty, left her to cope with whatever she had to. At the diner, he'd seen her eyes, the hurt that sprang from his words. It was clear she considered it betrayal, and though he found special amusement in the fact that Lisa, even unbeknownst to her, had gotten to a level of trust with him that she would have never imagined she would, and laughably felt offended by his acts while he was basically the last one on Earth she should expect anything from, something turned the glee bitter in his mouth. He reached out and adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see her, but she hid her face behind slouched shoulders.

Lisa opened her eyes just in time to see a road sign beside the motorway and her gaze flew to it, checking the direction they took. The next second she realized Rippner must have watched her from the corner of his eyes because he informed her evenly.

"We're going to Conway. I have to make a stop at the Centennial Bank before we proceed to Oklahoma. But first I want to make a stop at a car wash."

She acknowledged it without any reaction but as they pulled over at a service station off I-65, she sighed with relief at the possibility that she could get rid of his company, even only for a few minutes.

"You okay?" he asked as he parked the car, his expression mildly curious. There was something soft in his voice though, that Lisa couldn't put her fingers on.

She quirked an eyebrow, and leveled him with a half-concealed scoffing stare. "Why wouldn't I be?"

While he was dealing with the completely muddy-brown Bentley and guided it to the car wash, she strolled to the rundown pub in the other end of the lot. The place was dim and smelled of stale alcohol and smoke. Johnny Cash was blaring from the old jukebox, and at a wooden table a group of loud men were playing poker. At the counter, she ordered a bottle of Bud, not so out of desire to drink beer, more from the lack of idea. Maybe alcohol would bring her luck again in the fight against Rippner. Inhaling deeply the obtrusive stench, she had to smile because it felt much better than the air in the car. She took a sip from the bottle, and as she looked around in the premise at the other guests, the billiard-tables and the flaked-off green paint on the restroom doors, her mind awoke with a start from its hibernation.

In the back of the pub, right beside the toilet doors, there was a public phone attached to the wall.

Turning abruptly toward the woman behind the counter, she asked tensely. "How far is Conway from here?"

"About ten minutes down this road," was the reply.

With pounding heart, watching the parking lot through the dirty display windows for any sign of Rippner, Lisa hurried to the phone, picked up the receiver and dialed the number she already knew by heart after the numberless front pages and evening news in the TV.

At every beep of the line her heart answered with a dozen of hammering heartbeats. Her eyes stuck to the windows, a bit puzzled that Rippner trusted her enough to leave her alone; it was good to know it wasn't only her making mistakes, he was repeating his, too. It was unreasonable, incomprehensible, why he trusted her, and how he could possibly think she would comply with the same rules like it was a fair play soccer match. She chased a faint, piercing sensation she had no notion to name to the back of her mind.

The line connected, and she jabbered into the mouthpiece in a rush. Into the two short sentences that spilled out of her, she poured all her pain, hurt, fear and disappointment, attempted to pour her weakness, too, her indecision and naivety.

"I have information about Jackson Rippner's whereabouts. He will be in Centennial Bank in Conway, Arkansas within twenty minutes," and with that, she put the receiver back on the cradle with an unexpected dark weight upon her heart.

If Rippner caught her, she was dead meat, that one thing was sure.

As she walked away from the phone, a very contradicting emotion poured on her: from one side she felt elevated as if by carrying out a decision she regained possession of her own life and the flow of events, but somewhere deep under the surface her mood didn't feel overly unclouded. She had to remind herself it was eye for an eye, nothing more, nothing less: an exchange of betrayal. He didn't deserve anything but her utter contempt and the same way he was handling her.

And somehow, it just didn't feel right. Maybe because, and she resented it now even more than normally, she was too much of a people pleaser, and sinking down to the level of medieval jurisdiction just wasn't her cup of tea, even if it was the right thing to do. In the realm of vile schemes she had no place at all. She would beat him with a hockey stick anytime, face-to-face, but conspiring like mean courtiers or traitors was very far from her personality.

"Where were you?"

Her head snapped up, alarmed, and her gaze met Rippner's suspiciously roaming eyes as he was standing in the entrance of the pub. As nonchalantly as she could, Lisa lifted the bottle, leveling him with a glance as if asking if he was blind or imbecile.

"For a beer. Or what does it look like?"

His eyes were still glued to the interior, the faces of the other guests, looking for anything alarming or unusual.

"You have a problem with that? Wanted to guess what I'd order?"

She was relieved to see him relax. Even the annoyed glare he cast her filled her with calmness. She brushed past him and stepped out in the vague sunlight, not waiting for him to discover the phone in the back. As she started toward the once more clean Bentley, she heard him falling in line with her.

"Lisa."

She didn't stop or acknowledge she heard him in any way but she was glad to discover the lack of animosity or anger in his voice, meaning he didn't suspect anything. She was halfway across the parking lot, when he spoke again.

"I take it, it was believable."

Lisa stopped short, suddenly feeling deadly tired. "Not this, not again. Just… just shut up. Please. Alright? That's all I ask. I have enough of this for a lifetime."

Most probably he sensed the fatigue in her voice because he didn't lash out about her harsh reply. "Enough of what?"

"It's clear why you're doing this, I'm not that stupid. It's more convenient for you if I'm cooperating than having me _dragged across the country_."

He was composed, his voice calm and patient. "Doing what, Leese?"

"Don't act like you're stupid! The mind games. Stop messing with my head. I know what you're trying to do. You want me to think you're still on Keefe's side. I'm sure that's why you revealed all those things your higher-up shouldn't know about, right? But you know what? I don't care anymore. Just leave me alone."

She climbed in the car without another word. Rippner joined her a few moments later. He put the key in the ignition but didn't start the car. For a moment, he stared out the windshield, unseeing and fighting to gain back some of his usual detachment but it simply didn't work now. Something in his chest urged him to convince her, to win back her previous trust that he had frittered away so easily. Its absence felt like he was trying to force an ice cube down his throat. He found neither strength nor mood in him to war with her all along the way again, and it wouldn't lead anywhere anyway.

"That's true I told things Keefe wouldn't be happy about."

Lisa groaned and turned away, intent on tuning him out completely. As the engine turned on, she immersed in its purring, wishing she could drift away at the monotone sound. About a quarter of an hour, and the police would arrest him, and she would be free to go and call her father, call Keefe. He would be put in prison afterwards, without the chance for another plea bargain and she wouldn't have to fear his retaliation hopefully for a few peaceful years.

Unfortunately, the noise of the tires and engine couldn't muffle Rippner's voice.

"I had to do it, Lisa, otherwise no way it would ever work. His plans were shitty, completely transparent, and Henry isn't some stupid goon. He can sniff out a lie from a mile! And I've known him for more than ten years, and he knows me just as much. You think it is so easy to mislead him?"

Lisa squeezed her eyes shut and wished he just stopped talking.

"You should learn the best way to make a lie work is by telling at least a part of the truth."

How ironic, Lisa thought. She had just learnt it pretty perfectly, and Rippner wasn't even aware she had pulled it through at the service station.

He reached out and with two fingers placed under her chin, he forced her to face him. First she jerked her head away, but since he was insistent, Lisa returned his gaze sternly.

"If I hurt you, it was a must, Lisa."

She had to gulp. He was so good, so incredibly good at this. For a moment, her heart quivered, whispering her to believe him but she was determined to steel herself.

"We all know you're not the best actress. I needed your little play so it would look even more convincing."

He let her go, and she turned back toward the window, this time feeling her resistance waver. Her acting skills gained new light after the gas station in her own eyes but suddenly she realized she wasn't too proud of it. _Please, stop talking_, she willed him inwardly with panicky despair.

"I wish Henry was as easily convincible as you when it comes to believe I'm the boogieman," he sighed with a taut smile, and Lisa discovered a hint of bitterness in his voice that set her on edge. The most horrible fact was that she _wanted_ to believe him. Maybe it was an instinctive reaction to defend herself from the pain she'd felt over her own naivety at the diner, maybe it was the cruel result of his strategy against her, it didn't really matter.

The rest of the too short drive went by in a haze for her, and was jolted out of her turbulent thoughts by him parking the car in a narrow side street.

"Let's go."

He unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door. Lisa was about to object and try to convince him to leave her in the car but her voice abandoned her. He halted at the hood and when she didn't move, he strolled to her side and opened the door for her. Like she was marching into her death, Lisa climbed out. Shutting off the car, Rippner stood and studied her face, and suddenly she found it hard to meet his open gaze; with its unique color it seemed to penetrate right into her head, her heart, too, and squeeze it so violently that she gasped for breath.

"What?" she barked at him hoarsely, just to make him avert his eyes, and seeing the slight frown appearing on his face somehow eased her jangled nerves.

Obediently, she followed him toward the main street, but it felt like trudging in knee-deep mud, her legs made of lead. What was worse, her heart and stomach felt exactly the same way.

Nothing seemed out of ordinary, and as they rounded the corner, Lisa could spot the red-blue logo of the bank down the street about hundred yards ahead, and her steps became slower on their own volition as if they were having second thoughts. As she looked around stealthily, she couldn't spot a single patrol car or any sign of reinforcement, and no one was barging toward them either to arrest Rippner. It was very unlikely that they were planning it inside the bank, risking civil lives or that Rippner would detect that something was fishy. It had to happen in the street, if it would happen at all.

She groaned inwardly, realizing belatedly that there might have been more branches of this bank in Conway. If they really wanted to catch him, however, it shouldn't be a problem, even given the narrow timeframe she gave them. For a disappointed- and strangely relieved, too- moment she thought they didn't take seriously her warning, but as they continued their way, Lisa realized something after taking a glance at the short, two-storey buildings lining the street. It was more than probable that they were using snipers.

It made her stop short.

Could it be that they were ordered to kill him?

The thought disturbed and rattled her accurately collected determination, and she couldn't help but cringe at the idea. She just wanted them to arrest him alive and unharmed. Unreasonable or not, shooting him dead right in front of her eyes was something she would never be able to digest. To forgive herself.

Rippner misunderstood her nervousness. With a sigh, taking in her troubled expression, he stepped back to her. He held her at arm's length, stooping a bit to look in her face.

"I know it's hard for you to believe me right now but I didn't lie to you, Lisa: I won't kill Keefe." A hesitant smile crossed his lips, and his blue eyes shone as if he was about to share a punch line with her. "And as much as you annoy the heck out of me sometimes, I wouldn't kill you either. I'll keep my part of the bargain, just as I said. You have to trust me on that."

And for some reason, and it was the worst in it, she did trust him. If he was lying, he was doing it excellently. Her face, however, had to have a grief look because he slumped a bit, and ran a warm thumb across her cheek gently. In that moment she didn't even muse as to why she didn't recoil from his touch; and more importantly, why he would touch her that way. The sober part of her brain lay under mile-thick layer of ice, leaving one will in the front: to prolong the moment while they were still safe. _He_ was still safe.

"After we finish at the bank, we go eat something and talk about it if you want, all right?"

She bit her lip, channeling all her strength to hold back her tears, and wanted to tell him so many things, wanted him to read in her thoughts just this one time because the fact that he was completely unsuspicious, his seemingly unwavering trust in her ridiculously made her throat clench. Presumably taking her silence as consent, he moved to walk on.

Desperately, driven by sheer guilt, her arm shot out and clutched his shirt, and with breath catching in her throat, she pulled at him.

"Wait…"

The hesitant urgency of the moment was ripped apart by a bullet hitting human flesh.

* * *

**A/N:**_ A cliffhanger, sorry. It was already getting pretty long again._  
_I guess both of them are somewhat OOC in this chapter but I went ahead and assumed they had already built some kind of trust between them they werent even aware of. But then again, it might be a stretch from my side? Whatever._  
_Thank you so much for your reviews!_


	9. Harmonious dissonance

**A/N:** Thank you so much for the wonderful reviews. You really make my day! I'm happy they weren't too OOC. *hug*  
(Would-be) nurses and doctors out there don't read this chapter:D I'm sure I'd fail at the medical exams XD

* * *

**Chapter 9: Harmonious dissonance**

Three is a lucky number.

Three fortunate facts supported their case. The first was an advertising pillar on the side of the pavement that they happened to have halted behind, half-hidden by it. The second was the pretty short distance they had put between them and the corner behind which the Bentley was parked. The third was Rippner's incredible reflex with which he reacted instantly at the sound of the gunshot. Actually, there was a bonus fact in the strategically perfect position of a pick-up parked at curbside that provided good enough temporary cover when they dashed toward the side street and its relative safety, and could duck behind the car.

_Nothing hurts_: that was the first report Rippner's brain drew up after a quick-check, assessing the impulses his body sent. It left him with only one conclusion: if anyone, it was Lisa who had taken the hit.

Maybe it was because of her cry of pain, maybe the flood of blood covering her right side but as they rounded the corner, though Lisa was said to be his leverage, for some reason Rippner found himself shielding her with his own body. He hesitated to physically support her, not able to locate the wound but fortunately she could stand on her own.

In the turmoil of the next seconds, there was a second shot that lodged in the wall of the restaurant at the corner just as Rippner disappeared behind it, then a never-ending roll of shouting, tire scratching and the noise of rubber soles thundering against the pavement, and as he jumped in the Bentley, throwing his body across the seats to open the door for her, Rippner could hear the shrill of a police siren somewhere in a few streets distance.

The '_How the hell_' type of questions was yet to emerge in his head since he was more preoccupied with finding a way out of the ruckus.

As he started the car with a furious yank at the gearshift and swung the Bentley to the side and on the road, Rippner grabbed Lisa's unhurt shoulder and squeezed it. To his surprise, she reacted almost violently with a trembling start, her eyes almost haunted, glazed with pain and tears.

"Where did it hit you, Lisa?"

She sniffed and leant her head back as he turned the car to a main street with such force that the Bentley nearly swerved off the roadbed. Lisa shut her eyes, and instantly felt the teardrops creeping from under her lashes but she was too tired to even curse her weakness. In fact, it wasn't pain crying in her but her overwhelming guilt. Maybe it was divine jurisdiction that it was she who got shot, not him, a punishment for her treason – or so it felt in the waves of biting ache and nausea. The only consolation at the moment came when she realized she hadn't been forced to watch him die.

"Lisa!"

If anything, the tense urgency in his voice worsened the ache in her stomach. She shook her head and stifled a moan that wanted to break out of her as she watched him recklessly guide them through the traffic, changing lanes and driving around other cars, only barely avoiding them. He did it with such ease and elegance that she briefly wondered if he had been in similar situations a lot.

"I'm fine. It's only my arm." She pressed her left palm harder against the wound, and bit her lips. Wriggling in her seat, she tried not to bleed all over his car but seemingly Rippner wasn't concerned about it.

In the wing mirror Lisa could see a police car barreling down the lane after them, and above the noise the Bentley's tires and engine were making and the loud honk they received from other drivers, Lisa could hear sirens wailing. Momentarily, she was glad Rippner was preoccupied with getting rid of their tail because meanwhile, he wouldn't ask her inconvenient questions about the interesting emergence of the police.

Rippner scowled at the car before them, then at the others coming from the opposite direction in the other lane. There was no space to pass, and he punched the ball of his palm against the wheel in frustrated impatience.

"Go already, go!"

The police car was about five cars behind them, its blue flashlights giving it a clear way. Rippner cursed and grabbed the wheel harder.

"Hang on, Lisa!"

He swirled the wheel violently to the right, and the Bentley jumped the curb to the sidewalk. Lisa shrieked as they scarcely avoided a fireplug, then a guy with huge headphones who could hear their ear-splitting honk only in the last moment. Reaching an intersection, they ran the red light, navigated back onto the road and with that, caused an ugly havoc among the cars as they tried to prevent an accident. The Crown Victoria made a pathetic attempt to follow them but ended up in the metal heap in the middle of the intersection.

Within a minute they left Conway behind, and were dashing toward Little Rock. Rippner kept a watchful eye on the rearview mirror; he could still hear the sirens, and better safe than sorry, anyway.

"Lisa?" he stooped slightly to the side to look in her face but she kept her head pressed against the cold glass, hiding it as if this way she could hide from him completely. "Stay with me, all right?"

He touched her elbow, and she whimpered pathetically, not sure if out of pain or shame that he showed concern she didn't necessarily deserve. That minute she was more afraid of his care than his unleashed rage that was likely to come when he would find out what exactly had happened. Because sooner or later, he _would_ realize.

"I'm fine," she whispered, and giddily watched him grope for his phone that lay between the seats.

Biting back a curse, Rippner stared at the display: there were two missed calls from agent Alvarez. Exactly the person he wanted to shout at right now. If the ambush by the police was the FBI's retaliation for the amends he'd made to the plan, more precisely, taking Lisa with him, then Alvarez was even more of an idiot than he'd originally thought. Or probably the FBI had just found Yellow Bastard's body and decided he was too dangerous to let him run around freely. Punching the call button, he set his jaws. The line connected after one single beep, and Alvarez barked in his ear.

"What?"

Rippner barked back in the same manner. "I could ask the same."

"I'm listening to the report of the Conway PD right now."

"Really? Does it tell the fuckheads shot Lisa?"

"Shit. Is it severe?"

Rippner looked at her from the corner of his eyes and met her feebly curious stare for the first time ever since they got in the car. At his strained voice, she left her eyes on him, on his whitened fingers around the phone. She wasn't sure who was on the other end of the line but Rippner's fury was almost palpable and directed at the other person, seemingly and paradoxically he was finding calmness in stirring up a quarrel.

"Hopefully, not. But maybe you should have thought of it before you let this brilliant plan loose."

The next long moment of silence could mean anything from surprise to confirmation, and Rippner involuntarily pressed the phone harder against his ear as he waited for a reply. When Alvarez spoke again, his voice was accusatory and nothing else.

"You shouldn't have kidnapped her to begin with."

Superiorly, Rippner remarked. "Well, I did and it's my problem."

"You can be sure it will be your problem if something happens to her."

"Already has, thanks to your cops. Maybe you should stop shooting at her."

"You can believe me they weren't aiming at her."

"Well, your men can't shoot shit then."

"No, maybe you should stop hiding behind her."

At that, Rippner's voice took up a notch in volume, and stepped on the accelerator as though he wanted to emphasize his outcry. "You think I used her as a shield? What the hell you're taking me for?"

"You wouldn't be happy to hear it."

Rippner pinched the bridge of his nose. The verbal ping-pong game started to grow tiresome. "As much as I enjoy this little chat, I have better things to do right now." Suddenly, he blurted out the question. "Was this your idea?"

There was another pause before Alvarez mumbled gruffly. "No, local action. I called to warn you." A bit hastily, he added. "Rippner, don't hurt her."

"Why the hell would I?" he frowned.

"She's wounded, let her go."

At the agent's almost desperately persuasive tone like it was a crisis negotiation, the furrow on Rippner's forehead grew even deeper.

"Mind your own business which is to shut down the damn satellites, and make sure we're not followed!"

Rippner ended the call without waiting for an answer and dropped it back to its previous place between the seats. Still frowning, he first looked in the mirror for tails then cast a scrutinizing glance at Lisa who tried with all her might to return it without flinching. She was a bit taken aback by the part of the heated conversation she could catch. For some reason, he didn't behave like he considered her his life insurance, and it made her uneasy.

"Who was that?"

"Alvarez."

Lisa sank back into silence as Rippner hid behind his emotionless mask again, and wished she could read his thoughts. He had trusted her, and the mere idea of losing it made her stomach convulse with anxiety. She knew it was ridiculous, she knew he was a master of manipulation and she very probably was a victim of his games, she also knew that he might as well be a traitor of Keefe's plans, and still, his disappointment in her was just as much feared in that moment as his wrath. The fragile but in its existence ludicrous bond that had formed between them in the previous days appeared to be more significant for her than she'd ever imagined, and though Lisa pretty much resented it, even felt ashamed of the mere idea, there was nothing she could do about it.

With the reckless speed, even though Rippner chose to go on the interstate and minor- slower but less exposed- roads alternately, they made it to Little Rock in twenty minutes. It was far easier to blend in in a bigger city but he didn't want to stay in sight for too long and risk coming across with a patrol car. They drove around for only a short while, Rippner studied the streets and signs like he was trying to recollect his memories. Just off the city centre, without any hesitation he turned the car on a ramp, and they disappeared inside a huge nondescript concrete-metal building. As the car climbed upwards floor by floor, gazing out at the thick pillars and vast empty halls, Lisa realized they were in a public parking garage. On one of the higher stories Rippner parked the Bentley on a free spot, and killed the engine.

"You stay here, I get another car."

"What?"

"We can't use this one. It's all over in the police records by now."

Suddenly, Lisa felt the numbing bites of panic in her bones as she craned her neck to look out the rear windshield. "Don't leave me here."

Around them the parking lot was empty and seemingly abandoned. With the more and more throbbing ache in her arm, the nagging guilt in her stomach, her head reeled at the thought that she had to stay in a parking garage of all places. Rippner froze in the middle of a movement, and for a moment only stared at her, completely puzzled. The look on her face awoke an old memory, and with a scarcely audible sigh, he grabbed her chin only barely touching it, and made her look at him.

"You'll be okay. I'll be back soon."

He opened the glove box and retrieved the gun he kept there but when he wanted to shove it to her, Lisa refused it with a frantic shake of her head. Her throat seemed to be out of order but her eyes said it all.

"All right. Then I leave the key in the ignition in case you have to make an escape."

He grabbed a t-shirt from his bag, and twisted his body to take a look at her wound but Lisa shrank away.

"I just want to check how serious it is, Lisa."

"I'm fine. No worries," she breathed, and only she knew that the real reason behind the negligence of her injury was guilt. Subconsciously she thought if she kept denying the pain, kept forgetting the existence of the wound, her betrayal would dissipate, too.

Rippner's gaze bore into hers for long before he shrugged nonchalantly, dropping the shirt in her lap. "Lock the doors. Keep pressure on the wound."

From the backseat he took the laptop bag, shoved the gun in his waistband, put on his sunglasses and got out of the car. With calm steps like he was scheduled for a business meeting, he strolled to the nearby exit. Through the windshield, Lisa followed his steps with teary eyes until he disappeared behind a staircase door.

It wasn't before the fifteenth minute that it occurred to her that he had left her there and wasn't planning to come back. The thought implanted contradicting emotions in her.

"That's what you wanted, right? Now you're free to go," she murmured to herself and waited. Her legs didn't seem to know the steps toward freedom. Neither did her heart. She took two painkillers, not quite sure if she wanted to ease the pain in her arm, or somewhere else.

The twentieth minute brought an unexpected pang of anger and hurt that he could leave her just like that. He surely realized who was responsible for the fiasco, after all, he was a very smart man, and it was a very stupidly accomplished act. At least, he should have yelled with her. The thought drew a twisted, shaky smile on her face. She was getting irrational.

From the twenty-fifth minute on, she grew troubled. What if the police recognized him? She pictured him lying on the pavement, shot in the chest, in the head, in a pool of his blood, encircled by the police and indifferent EMTs. The image was so vivid, so horrible, fed from her own memories of him back at her father's house, aggravated by her guilt that painted the whole picture black, that she didn't even stop to meditate on the terrible ache that scratched at her heart, chewed at it and spat it out. She pressed her face against the cold glass, and cried inconsolably.

When the second hand on her watch signaled the end of a half hour, a dark blue Audi came to a halt beside the Bentley, and Rippner, unharmed and calm, got out of it.

"I thought you left," Lisa whispered as he opened the passenger side door and crouched before her. She tried to hide her tears, the guilt in her eyes and the relief she felt over seeing him alive. She was sure her face was ugly red, puffy and tear-smudged, and everything but controlled: it was written all over her what she'd done; or so she imagined.

He smiled vaguely, searching her face and reached up to wipe off the tears. His touch was surprisingly gentle for someone like him.

"You wanted me to?"

She rubbed her face against her shoulder, sniffed, and shook her head with a faint smile. He swept her hair back from her face, and helped her out. As Lisa settled on the passenger seat of the Audi, Rippner loaded their bags from the back seat of the Bentley into the trunk of the other car, emptied the glove compartment too, swept the floor around the seats before he locked the Bentley with a sour expression, and pocketed the keys.

Though she still protested meekly, he removed her shirt sleeve and examined the wound.

"You were pretty lucky. The bullet went through it without hitting the main artery. Don't look this way," he smiled warningly but a bit too late, and she groaned at the sight of her mangled arm. "It ripped the skin apart. Probably the flesh, too. It's nothing I can treat with a few butterfly stitches."

Lisa didn't trust her own voice, so she simply nodded in acknowledgement. Rippner's face was closed again, but the way he studied her face was intense as ever, and she felt herself fidgeting uncomfortably.

"You want to go to a hospital?" he asked finally, and she blinked at him in surprise.

"I thought we can't see a doctor."

"_I can't_. To you, it doesn't apply. I can give you a lift to a hospital."

"But…" With a sinking feeling, she realized he would leave her there and proceed on his way alone. Before she could think it twice, it slipped from her lips: "No, it doesn't hurt that much."

If he was surprised, there was no sign of it on his face. The penetrating, unnerving blue of his eyes darkened a degree but was still eerily unearthly, and she fought to suppress a shudder gathering in her spine. There was something rippling under the surface that could erupt any minute like a geyser, abruptly, frightfully, she knew it from experience, and the unpredictability of his temper set her on edge.

"You realize this is your chance to get rid of me peacefully."

His last word disturbed Lisa, and her gaze dropped to her knees on its own volition. Could it really be a hint or she was simply being paranoid?

"I thought I'm not a hostage and free to go anytime."

"Correct."

Rippner was fully aware of the effect his gaze had on people, and never hesitated to use it to his advantage. Most of the time it won him battles, arguments. This time, he simply reveled in scrutinizing her, examining her subconscious body language his stare pulled out of her; it told him more than any words could. He could have written a book about her by now, about her insincerity, about the faked truths she constructed for others and the half-lies even she believed in sometimes. He could read in the sweep of her lashes, the cautious way she peeked at him from the corner of her eyes, the anxious- delicious- curve of her lower lip. The little crouch of her shoulders was an indicator of a fight between instincts and brain cells over muscles as she tried _not_ to shrink away, _not_ to jump up and run. Why had she stayed then while he was away?

After he'd rented the Audi and driven back to the parking garage, he was sitting in the car for long. Seconds stretched into minutes while he was debating with himself. He could put two and two together. He was just reluctant to do so.

There were a few people, on a second thought maybe not even only a few, who wanted him back in jail, with his ex-manager right on the top of the list since it was presumably easier to lock him up than deal with him; not to mention Alvarez who could follow their every step 24/7. But only one person beside him knew where they were heading to. The shootout at the bank wasn't a random action of a random patrol that had a lucky day. As far as he could ascertain, the shot came from above: they obviously used a marksman who'd been hiding on a roof.

With increasing distress he had slowly realized his mind was trying to find excuses for her, come up with someone else who could betray them, and he groaned with disgust. She made him weak and unguarded, unreasonable even, that one was sure, and it could have cost his life. Repeatedly he was doing the same mistakes, trusted her against all reasoning. He was a damn fool, deserving to be shot like a dog.

There in the car, pulling on cold logic, his all-time life-saving method, he'd assessed the situation: he had everything with him that was needed, laptop, money, ID cards, weapons. He started the car, drove a block, and another, went past an intersection, a city park, and cursing himself turned the car and headed back to the garage. For some reason he was sure she would still be there, waiting for him, would be waiting for him for hours, and not because her wound paralyzed her, not because the dread of parking lots petrified her; he didn't know the reason though, but the mere idea confused him completely. He had to check if he knew her that much. If he could unravel her and understand her motives.

And he wanted to see if she would lie in his face. No, scratch that: he _wanted_ her to lie in his face so he could lash out and release his frustration, tension, disappointment, disgust that was mostly addressed to himself. He wanted this tiny possibility, a half-assed pretext to despise her and cut the bonds that had been spun between them against his better judgment. He could picture himself strangle her to death: would he be able to strangle that bond with her, too? The uncomfortable hurt?

"Is there something that's bothering you, Leese?"

He could feel the fury welling up in him, rushing through his arteries like fuel waiting for a tiny spark to explode in flames, and its pressure was so unbearable that he couldn't care less if the fire would burn him down to ashes eventually. _Lie to me, Leese, just for this one time, lie to me,_ he willed her lips, anticipating the flick of her tongue and the spark-word- _No!_- rolling off of it, but she surprised him this time.

"Yes," she whispered silently, and the tears running down her cheeks, the soft, gentle sweep of her eyes across his face seemed to put out the destructive heat of the embers, only his heart kept on beating fast. He had a horrible foreboding that with her next word, with a simple sentence, a simple _honest_ sentence, she would inevitably and irrevocably bind her to him.

Or worse: him to her.

Lisa looked him in the eyes boldly like someone who had nothing to lose, and she didn't want anything but to put this burden down. "I did it. I called the police."

He was just staring at her, expressionless and frighteningly calm. She remembered his face from the airplane bathroom when from behind the perfectly restrained mask suddenly, almost in the middle of a sentence he'd started with cool sarcasm, a demon within him broke out, and all she could recall was pain, his fingers around her neck, his venomous, murderous hiss against her earlobe and the realization that she, like the mythological woman with the fateful jar, set something free that should have been remained leashed and locked up. She was anticipating it again, the reappearance of the inner demon, and her guts twisted in fear.

"Why?"

"Because… you know why, you have to know why," she muttered desperately, with wavering certainty. Her voice sounded persuasive like she wanted to convince him that she had been right. Or worse, to convince herself.

Rippner concluded matter-of-factly. "You thought I was on their side."

"Yes."

"And now? What do you think now?"

She eyed him meekly, attempting, in vain, to distinguish her rational thoughts and turbulent feelings that were numbed by fear and pain at the moment. He'd been right, she was way too emotional sometimes. "I'm not sure."

"Still want to call the police?"

"I think, no."

"Why not?" He was relentless with the questions, and his unwavering coolness unsettled her. Suddenly she became aware of his hand he left lying on her wrist, and strangely its warmth eased the knot in her stomach.

"What if you're on Keefe's side? I'd then botch it for him. For you. I have to take this risk. And I have this stupid gut-feeling you really wouldn't hurt him," she smiled faintly, tears obscuring her voice.

"Always listen to those gut-feelings. They're correct," he smiled back, and this time it reached his eyes. With that, though, hers faltered and morphed into a sad one.

"No, not always." At his raised eyebrows, Lisa added. "Once upon a time they told me to join someone at an airport bar because he could be… something," she finished clumsily, and cast her eyes at her shoes, cursing herself for the sudden sincerity.

Rippner simply nodded, eyes glazing for a moment. "You realize it would have still happened the same way even if we didn't share a drink beforehand?"

"Yeah. But it would have been less painful," Lisa muttered softly, honestly.

Rippner nodded again. He didn't say he was sorry. But she didn't expect it either.

"You know, as much as you claim you never lie, you just did it right there."

"What are you talking about?"

"You, pretending to be someone else, someone I would like, someone being interested…" her heart clenched at the memory, at the ache it still evoked in her. Clenched at the vulnerability she pushed herself in at the moment. Her frankness got rewarded, though, as a feeble confession slipped from his lips.

"There was no pretence in that, Lisa. Not a single word," he huffed annoyed. "Not even my intentions, not there, at the bar. Whatever I said before, I enjoyed every moment, except when _you_ lied to me about a damn cocktail, for crying out loud."

In another situation, his indignation would have made her laugh, this time, though, she watched him curiously. His gaze was dancing around her face, sweeping across it before he stood.

"I'd have never thought it'd hurt you that much eventually."

She couldn't make any comment on it.

: :

The narrow road they chose toward Oklahoma led through a forest. It was late afternoon, the sun was low, hidden behind the foliage, and it wrapped the road in dimness.

Lisa was in a half-conscious state, trying to numb herself into sleep but the unceasing ache in her arm wouldn't let her. Rippner had cleaned her wound as much he could back in the parking garage. In Hot Springs he made a quick stop at a store, and when he came back, he was carrying a bag with a pharmacy logo on it. As he sat in and buckled the belt, he shoved a bottle of whisky in her hand.

"What's this?" Lisa blinked confusedly.

Rippner half-smiled at her, and rolled the car back on the road. "I know. It's not my favorite brand either but that was the best I could get."

She chuckled at him through the thin layer of tears of pain.

"That's the best anesthetic I could get," he cast a sly gaze at her. "Should I have bought vodka instead?"

Sullenly, Lisa muttered. "I wouldn't order a Sea Breeze or a Bay Breeze ever again."

"Drink some, Lisa."

"It reminds me of those war movies when a soldier gets his arm cut off. What are you planning to do to me?"

Rippner looked at her gravely, voice void of humor. "Give you another scar."

Her fingers involuntarily tightened around the neck of the bottle, unscrewing it with darkened mood.

As an afterthought, he added. "To remember me by."

"No need for that. I'd remember you anyway," she murmured downheartedly, and glared out the window.

Rippner smiled grimly. His heart pumped the blood vigorously at the thought that he had permanent impact on her. Subconsciously he'd had the apprehension that she would move on unaffected, get over their encounter and forget it, forget him like he wasn't an important station in the course of her life – he never stopped to ponder he was worried because it was he who couldn't really move on, even in the prison there was not one day when he hadn't thought of her; not in a flattering way, of course. It was enough retaliation now that he could claim a place in her life. Most probably in a very imposing company somewhere between a rapist, the Grinch and Osama Bin Laden, he thought gloomily.

When she looked drowsy enough after the slow and bristling sips from the bottle, he stopped at the first motel and checked in. He had to take care of the wound properly but for that, they needed a clean and calm place.

It wasn't a joyride. He cleaned the wound deeply again. The whisky-painkiller combination showed its positive effect when he trimmed the edges with neat, accurate cuts, and Lisa's reaction was only a row of half-muffled whimpers from behind her hand. It was when he closed the wound with three surgical sutures that she cried out in pain, and he knew from experience how horrible the feeling was.

"That's the worst needlework I've ever seen," she remarked jokingly as she stole a glance at the work he'd done.

"You should see my crochet-works."

She gave him a shaky little laugh, and wiped her face off with a sniff.

He wrapped her arm in gauze, hiding the newest imperfection of her skin gently. Now he, too, could claim a mark on her body- he only hoped it didn't put him on the same level with that rapist-, if only loosely related to him, but the fact made him rather bitter. If nothing else, they could compare theirs.

Over the night her temperature rose slightly but it wasn't anything serious. During the day she moved to the backseat of the car, and as much she could she slept it off. Rippner considerately made a slow progress across Arkansas, inserting frequent breaks so the journey wouldn't be so tiring for her. The wound swelled and was still red around the stitches, and her skin felt like it wanted to burst apart, but otherwise it seemed to heal normally.

They were already in Oklahoma when his cell phone rang, and according to the caller ID, it was Alvarez again.

"Are you on the move?" the agent snapped, not wasting time on pleasantries.

Clueless, Rippner drawled slowly. "Yeah?"

"Then care to enlighten me why your signal isn't moving with you?"

Then it hit him, and it was all he could do to swallow the laughter bubbling in his chest. The amusement, however, was apparent in his voice, and it didn't do any bad that it undoubtedly annoyed Alvarez.

"Oops, I guess I accidentally left it there when I changed the car?"

There was a snap on the other end of the line like an object hit a hard surface. Maybe a coffee mug, or he'd just kicked something. Or probably, someone. "Accidentally? You little piece of shit!"

Flippantly, Rippner quipped. "Where did you put your manners, Alvarez?"

The agent's snarl transformed into open shouting. "Rippner, if you go AWOL, I go after you personally and haul your criminal ass into jail!"

"I hope you check your blood-pressure regularly. A nice weekend to you, too."

He pocketed the phone with a laugh. At least, with the tracking devise he would know where the Bentley was, in case it got stolen. Provided, Alvarez didn't decide on seizing it.

He squinted at Lisa. Fortunately, she was asleep on the passenger seat. He suspected she wouldn't find the development so funny.

: :

Their room in the roadside motel looked over a backwater that on this mid-November morning seemed rather dull and boring, grey under the overcast sky. There were two rundown but comfortable patio chairs on the balcony that was so narrow that if Rippner reached out, he could touch Lisa with his fingertips.

Despite the chilling weather, they nestled in the chairs and gazed out at the rural landscape. Rippner draped a blanket over his legs, Lisa was completely covered in another one, knees pulled to her chest as she cradled her cup in her palms. From the vending machines in the hallway he'd bought two cups of what couldn't be called anything but a sorry excuse for a coffee but momentarily Lisa was more than grateful for the hot beverage. A boat cut across the water lazily, and she followed its path with unseeing eyes. Her gaze swam to the side at the man sitting a few feet away from her with his head rested on the back of the chair. The feeble sunlight gave a ginger tone to his hair – like the tiniest, about-to-unfold walnut tree leaves, the flip sides against the wind; it was that color. The long eyelashes drew bluish shadows under his eyes as he kept them close. Something in her that she hadn't even been aware of reared and wanted to snap its leash. Sometimes she discovered a disconnection between what she saw and what she knew about him, and she briefly wondered if it was dangerous.

"Did you really kill your parents?" she asked softly.

Rippner, still eyes closed, snorted. "Why does it matter?"

"Just… I just want to know…" Maybe to bring back that connection, she thought to herself.

"Because it'd be plain cruel? You wanna know the extent of my evilness?" his scornful tone seeped in his eyes too, as he finally looked at her. It didn't escape her attention how the fine-cut fingers twined around the arm-rest. "You hope I'd say I was joking, don't you, Leese?"

At his strange smile Lisa answered with her vague one, with an unsure, wavering smile.

"It was meant to be a joke." The pause stretched for long seconds, his gaze dropped its cold edge, his smile, too. He waited till she decided about the smile and as she turned its brightness up a notch, he announced evenly. "But also a true one. Or rather, a half-true one. Only my mother died in the process."

Lisa tried not to show her shock, whether over his words or the fact that deep inside she was indeed hoping for a negative answer. "And you really were ten?"

"Nine and a little, actually, but yes."

The stunned silence said it all. She glared in her cup, not seeing the ugly brown dishwater, and stuttered. "But… how?"

Amused, he squinted at her. "You ask how? Shouldn't you ask why?"

"I just try to imagine how a ten-year-old boy would accomplish something like that."

"So you wanna know if I grabbed a knife and slit her throat?" At her involuntary moan, he shrugged. "Well, I didn't. The easiest way was arson. I set the house on fire."

"What?"

Rippner actually chuckled, and she shuddered at the morbidity of the reaction. "Yeah, I know, not too elegant, more like an own goal. I didn't have style those days."

"Why did you do it?"

Silence descended upon them, so long that Lisa started to think that just as most of the times, he wouldn't elaborate. The line of his lips became rigid as he glared to the side at the lake, at the withering trees and yellow, thin grass. What really surprised her was her own aching curiosity that was craving for an answer, for something personal, something he wouldn't tell anyone. With detached voice, with coldness, coolness only he could muster, Rippner spoke up with such apathy like he was talking about someone he knew only vaguely.

"My father was some fucked up insurance agent, my mother a shell of a person with no own will whatsoever. Had she wanted anything or dreamt of anything, it died a sudden death when it met my father's opinion. She did what she was told. He called her every freaking day to tell her what he wanted for dinner. He ordered her what to wear, what to like, how to talk. So subdued, so predictable – even after so many years, it still disgusts me that she was just like-"

He didn't finish the sentence but Lisa knew him that much already and could easily guess what he wanted to say: _she was just like every other woman_. Like it was an offense to him that he had an average woman for a mother. Now at any rate it was an explanation for his chauvinism, his utter contempt toward women and their- as he presumed- nonexistent will.

He at least had the decency to leave the comment unfinished in her presence. For some reason, Lisa was sure- and it filled her with unexpected delight- that if there were any women in the world who earned faint, unwilling respect from him, it was her.

"She was beautiful, actually, a prom queen in some shithole town in Oregon. You know, with huge dreams of a magnificent future full of success and fame. Typical suburban, mediocre way of thinking. Anyway, she made a mistake by marrying a boring jerk and letting dreams die in the mundanity of everyday, leaving her frustrated to the core. The only times I saw her real smile were when she was talking about the pre-marriage period of her life." His face suddenly distorted from expressionless into angered. "She was the most despicable woman I've ever met. Instead of having enough of it one day, prepare breakfast and then leave all this shit behind, she stayed cowardly and suffered from being locked in a life she hated."

Softly so she wouldn't divert his anger toward her, Lisa managed. "Ever occurred to you that she stayed maybe because she cared for you?"

Rippner laughed drily. "She didn't, believe me. Beyond worrying if I had the best marks so I wouldn't piss my father off, she wasn't interested at all. I was part of the furniture she had to take care of: dust the cushions, mop the floor, feed the kid. In a way, she hated me for ruining her life, robbing her of her glorious future. All she saw in me was her own failure and disappointment; what she never could have because I was in the way. So she was obeying my father's whims, dying a bit every day in the dullness, keeping up façade and feigning smiles, feigning care, words, acts, everything. She was lying in every single moment of her life."

Lisa had to cast her gaze at the ground. Here was the root, the crux of his trust-issues, the reason why he was so angry about _her_ fake life, why he was so annoyed that she didn't break out of the safe routines, leave her cage when she was predestined for more. Whether Rippner meant it an insinuation for her or it was a simple comment on his mother, he didn't make it clear as he still wasn't inclined to meet her gaze, and found an indifferent spot somewhere over the horizon to look at.

"'_I'm doing everything for this house_', my father would say when he was unsatisfied with something, and he usually was. She had to be the perfect wife, I had to be the perfect kid with perfect grades, his house the perfect home in the street. Beyond the outlook he wasn't interested in either of us. I hated him, I hated that house, I hated her for every feigned minute. So one day, I just wanted to end it. Wanted to find out what he would do if there was no house he could do his things for."

Lisa refrained from pointing out that his inner drive for perfection and precision, his desire to be in control, his pleasure in ordering people around were seemingly inherited from the father he hated so much for the same foibles. Possessing dominance and still being repulsed by the subject's (in this case, his mother's) submission was one of the many contradictions about his personality. For a moment, she wondered what kind of a woman could be his partner but very soon she came up with zero result. Keeping her own will and still being subdued by his was something nobody could accomplish without concessions from his side. Well, not in a long-term relationship, at least.

Rippner took a sip from the obviously lukewarm coffee, and smiled a bit, almost apologetically.

"I have to admit, it all started as an accident. All I wanted was a mug of hot milk but the dishcloth beside the stove caught fire. I happened to watch it spread over the curtains without doing anything. Then I chose to feed it with other flammable objects. They were sleeping upstairs. Apparently, my father woke first. Or at all. Anyway, he was too busy with saving some useless possessions, sight drafts and Treasury bonds, instead of saving his wife, let alone the damn kid. He ran out just before it caved in. I have no idea if she lost consciousness in the smoke or simply wanted to stay inside, it doesn't matter; he came out alone, with a stack of paper and money. I think he was quite disappointed that I was already outside, safe and sound."

"So after all, it wasn't entirely your doing."

"Technically, no. But don't think I regret anything. I didn't shed a teardrop, or not for them, anyway, rather for myself."

Neither Lisa- for she wouldn't know it- nor Rippner realized the controversy in his subconscious endeavor to have a full view of Lisa's everyday, painfully average life while experiencing the same thing had pursued him into a violent act in his childhood. Whether it was underlying desire to understand something he'd failed to, or it was simple compensation his guilty conscience he wasn't even aware of was playing on him was another question.

"And what happened afterwards?"

"In Oregon, I was under the age of criminal responsibility. I quickly realized I had to choose between going in a youth detention center and staying with my father. Needless to say, he'd have been happier if I chose the psychiatric care but it wasn't too appealing so I confessed that I was careless and it was a horrible, sad accident. The legal guardians decided I wasn't suffering from any disorder, so they decided to leave me with my father. Not more than a week later he sent me off to my mother's aunt. I gotta say she wasn't overly happy; after all, I caused the death of her beloved niece who she, by the way, hadn't felt the urge to visit for years. She was an old hag constantly on booze, so after a while she just didn't care if I was there or not."

He finished the coffee and crunched the plastic cup. Lisa finished hers, too, and bowed her head on her knees, facing him curiously. Already as a kid he seemed to have a screw loose, no wonder he became quite a twisted adult. She couldn't decide if it was disturbing or simply pitiful.

She started to feel cold but she didn't want to interrupt him. The moment was a real treasure for her: Rippner had never shown any inclination before to talk about himself beyond less important tastes and likes. His face was distant now, with the ghost of a smile that on anyone else would have been nostalgic; on his, it was only cynical.

"We parted ways when I was sixteen. Needless to say, it wasn't tearful. I've never seen her again, or my father, for that matter. Was living in the streets afterwards, wasn't more than any other worthless criminal but I was quite good in stealing and deceiving unsuspecting people."

The hint, the amused glint in his eyes as he squinted at her made Lisa frown, but it dropped soon as she realized that finally, she arrived to the question she'd been unconsciously craving for asking him for so long now. To understand how it all started, or not really understand because she doubted she ever could but knowing how it happened would give her a clearer sight of him – or so she hoped.

"How did you finally end up with… them?"

"They found me. Or rather, I found them. Witnessed something I shouldn't have, they wanted me dead, I wanted in. Persuaded them, won, they trained me, and here I am," he spread his arms out a bit bitterly, but Lisa suspected the bitterness wasn't because of the job but because he was out of it and on the run.

"That's it? But how, why?"

Her disappointment of the answer had to be pretty apparent as Rippner laughed at her coldly.

"You were expecting a more dramatic explanation? Something more acceptable? Tears and regret?"

There was no point in denying that. Lisa pursed her lips but otherwise remained silent. His cruel, condescending smile hurt her.

"There's nothing like that, Leese, no melodrama. I thought with them I could use my abilities perfectly. Simple as that."

She snorted, not less ironically. "Abilities? Of killing people without scruple or what? Some abilities."

"_Orchestrating_ it," he corrected her. "They put me back in school, financed my university studies, stating I was too smart to be wasted. By the time I finished my studies, though, I was already a trained employee, slowly climbing higher and higher."

"Slowly slaughtering your way up the carrier ladder."

He laughed. "Ever told you I love your phrasings?" Lisa simply rolled her eyes at the twisted compliment. His smile, though, didn't leave his face so quickly this time. "I've always been more of a thinker, actually. As you can see, I'm not quite cut out for the physical part. I don't say I'm not trained, I know I'm fast but I enjoy more the organizing and psychological part of the problem-solving; that's how I call it."

"Does anyone know about this? Your past, I mean."

"Just a few. My higher-ups, obviously. The Cleaner who got rid of the records. Michele. And now you. Hope you feel honored." Lisa had to chuckle when he squinted at her.

"Oh, you can't imagine." And in a bizarre way she really did feel so.

The thoughtful quiet could be interpreted in many ways. This time, Rippner couldn't read in Lisa's face, she showed him her profile and looked away toward the horizon. Strangely, her silence stirred an unpleasant sensation in him, and he reproached himself for going into this conversation for God knows what reasons. He told himself he wanted to drive her away, to make the fragile but unwanted connection between them snap because it _would_ snap after she heard what he'd done already as a child. But it sounded like a lie. It happened recently more and more often: catching himself out in a lie, and he didn't like it.

It was more like a test if that bond would really snap at all.

"So, do I disgust you even more?" Though intended to be sarcastic, he hated to sense how strained his voice sounded to his ear. It was a rhetorical question, he didn't really wait for an answer so was taken aback when Lisa actually considered it.

"No, I don't think so."

"Because that would be impossible, right?" he snorted, and this time his sarcasm could cover whatever hell had broken loose in him.

Lisa was wrapped in her thoughts, relaxed and calm but with a tiny wrinkle on her forehead. Suddenly, he understood something that seemed to ferment his guts.

"Don't you dare feel sorry for me. I don't want your pity. As I told you, I don't regret anything."

"I don't," she said quietly. As she looked at him, there was something equally defying and challenging in her faint smile but her gaze had a deep, almost grave edge. "If I feel sorry for someone then it's that ten-year-old kid who ended up acting in extremes. You approve that?"

He gaped at her softened face, and shrugging, he wanted to shrug off the soul-scratching sensation her glance caused in him.

"That kid is dead. You do whatever you want."

She had to hide her amusement over the reaction so typical of him; when he felt threatened in a way by something he couldn't understand, control or examine at the moment, his defense was either offensive or apathetic.

"So you're from Oregon?" His silence was typical, too. "Portland?"

"You shouldn't know too many things about me, now, should you?"

"Oh, I forgot, you'd have to kill me. But you're gonna do it anyway."

He failed to see the glimmer in her eyes that was more jokey than serious this time. "Am I?"

"So you say when you threaten me."

"Oh, right," he chuckled finally, and to play his usual part in the game, he deliberately left her remark open.

Lisa smiled in the hollow between her knees, briefly wondering how they got from real threats to empty ones, from fear on one side and vengeance on the other to something akin to a middle ground of mutual truce. This was the first time she didn't think of it as something dangerous, something she shouldn't let happen.

And somehow acknowledging it, it opened an up until then tightly locked lid in her. And with that, the urge to ask, to know, to see and understand broke loose.

She wanted to ask if he got his eyes from his father or mother but in the very last minute she held it back. Probably, he wouldn't react positively, and it didn't matter anyway. As she suppressed the question, though, a dozen other sprang in its place. She wanted to ask if he had half-brothers and -sisters, if he'd been afraid in the dark as a kid, what costume he wore for Halloween if he wore at all, if he liked peanut butter and banana sandwich, if he could ride a bike without hands; who was the first girl he kissed and if he'd ever been in love. There were even more things she wanted to ask, wanted to know of the man she'd fought to distance herself from for many-many weeks after the flight and even when they went on this mission. The questions ached in her throat, in her heart as she bound them, reprimanding her sudden curiosity.

She didn't know that for some time now, he wanted to know the same things about her.

"What happened to your father? Is he still alive?" she asked eventually, not able to hold it back.

"As far as I know, he is. A half year after the arson, he remarried a woman who, guess what, had been working as a secretary at the same insurance company. It's safe to state he'd been screwing her for a while," he spat, and Lisa cringed at his reappeared temper. "How despicable. He had a perfect life with a perfect wife who did everything that left his mouth, and he was cheating on her with some loose chick. A nobody like him."

Lisa stared at him, and before she knew it, the question slipped from her lips. "So you'd never… have never cheated on anyone?"

She felt the blush rising to her face, and wrapped herself more in the blanket to hide it, damning her curiosity again. It was like playing puzzle, and the more pieces she could collect, the more curious and impatient she turned to double it. This was again something she couldn't decide about him for it was one of those contradictory attributes he possessed. Most men were known for sporting this idea, and Rippner pretty much looked like he was one of those with all the misogynist bullshit and his contempt of women. But then she remembered how he hated lying, and cheating pretty much meant the same.

At least, Rippner was more surprised at her question than to mock her for it.

"Let's just say I've never had anything with anyone where this term would have a meaning."

"It means you never had a long term relationship?" she asked surprised; not that she could imagine him going home to someone and talk about his day at work while helping to set the table. What kind of a woman would tolerate him for a long period, anyway? And what kind of a woman would be good enough for him?

"Depends how you define long term. If being on and off and on and off with the same woman falls into this category, then I had. Provided, it applies even if it never lasted for more than a few weeks. But if I felt like sleeping with another woman, then I called it off. It means what you have isn't worth shit anymore anyway."

Lisa had to admit it was just as fair in a lazy, twisted and calculating sort of way as typical of him: disappointingly practical and cool. It could be easily done, if he didn't have the heart in the relationship; but then again, maybe he didn't even have a heart in that sense.

Curiously, Rippner was eying her. "What about you?"

"No long term here either." Half year, tops, but she wasn't about to tell him that. Tell him anything in this connection, actually.

"Short terms, then? Lewd one night stands, Ms Reisert?"

Lisa disregarded both his amused tone and the remark, and remained silent. They were galloping toward an area she didn't want to go. Keeping her gaze ahead, she tried to convey she considered the conversation over but it didn't work for her the way it always worked for him.

"You were about twenty-four. Don't tell me he was the first," he drawled a bit pitifully, coldly and sarcastically. His tone left her mortified and hurt. So did the reminder. The insinuation. The idea itself. Her eyes closed on their own volition. _He was the last._

The thought made her stand abruptly. She hugged the blanket tightly as if it could shield her heart from his poison arrows, and glared at him offended, wanted to go past him but Rippner gripped her wrist and held her in place, just beside his chair.

"It was just a question."

"A rude and tactless one."

"But it takes a one word answer. Yes or no. I don't think there's any other option, isn't there, Leese?"

He was cocky again, talked to her like she was imbecile; she hated the overly derisive curve of his eyebrows. The offensive line of his upper lip. That life before the incident seemed like it belonged to someone else she had been told about. Those guys from her past didn't have a face anymore.

Through her teeth, through the hurt, she slurred. "No, he wasn't."

Suddenly, Rippner wanted to ask how many there had been so achingly that it felt like an inner scratch. His arm involuntarily pulled her closer but she resisted like a prey on guard. With a snicker in the corner of his lips, he looked up at her.

"How old were you at the first?"

She looked beautifully pissed, and jerked her arm but he kept her tightly. "Nine."

More gently, he nagged her. "Come on, I'm curious."

"Seventeen."

"Umm, let me guess. A blond jock from senior class?"

Her face flushed, and her smile said it all. Lisa let him push her back to the chair, and a bit defeated, she settled back. "Actually, yes. I'd had a crush on him for quite a long time before that."

Rippner found himself trying to swallow a very uncomfortable feeling he hesitated to dwell on. "Why didn't it last long? You realized he was an empty-headed moron?"

"You jerk." She scowled at him, not really seeing the reason for his sudden animosity, and felt offended by his criticism on her past choices. "No. He graduated, and we simply lost touch."

"Did it hurt? Were you crushed afterwards?"

"No, it was okay. It faded out, simple as that. I wasn't ready for anything serious and he wasn't cut out for it either."

"What about college? There had to be a few more."

Lisa shrugged, a bit off-balanced by the topic of his interrogation. She'd dated guys before, enjoyed it, anticipated the dates but right now her memories felt like scenes from a movie – strange, unfamiliar. She didn't know if she could ever do it again.

Rippner glared at her huddled form with increasing temper. Again, that feeling. He wanted to know the number, names, descriptions, facts. Wanted to rip something apart, too. That Lisa from the past was a stranger to him: he'd only seen her creating an island around her in every waking minute of her life, and no one was able and allowed to enter it. She would do it even at the grocery store by putting in her earplugs, just like she did at the airport standing in the line as if by listening to her iPod, tuning out the world around her and cherishing the illusion that she was there alone, she could make herself believe that she, too, didn't exist for other people. But the Lisa he didn't know, that Lisa prior to the rape had to be different, and he wasn't sure he wanted to get to know her but his curiosity got the better of him.

"You're still in touch with any of them?" When Lisa shook her head, he asked mercilessly. "Had been till the parking lot?"

She stared at him again, this time very sullenly. "Stop this."

"It's still just a question. I'm not trying to judge you."

Frowning, Lisa tried to remember the times that felt now separated from her. "No, I guess I wasn't. When I finally decide to end something, then it's ended."

"In this, we're the same then," he commented with a satisfied expression. From her part, it was a moment for retaliation.

"And you, who was the first? If I can guess. A younger girl from school you lured into a dark corner?"

Rippner laughed, and she envied him the relaxed posture he maintained.

"A near miss." He winked at her, and Lisa felt her stomach make a flip-flop. She simply couldn't understand how he was able to pull off that his arrogant over-confidence seemed- objectively said, examined from safe distance but with reluctant honesty- almost irresistible. He was everything a woman in her right mind should avoid, he had '_danger'_ written all over him, and still, she couldn't deny- again: objectively, reluctantly, honestly, that all- how charming it was in a devilish way. "She was two years older. She was senior, I was sophomore. The dark corner is correct, it happened where they kept the PE equipment. And yeah, I talked her into it."

"Why am I not surprised?" Lisa couldn't hide a smile but it was a bit crooked. She peeked at him a bit hostilely. "I hate the likes of you. You must have broken a lot of hearts."

"Maybe," he admitted. "I know for you it's hard to believe, but I never did it intentionally, never out of cruelty. And never deluded them that it could be anything more."

Lisa wanted to counter back, bring up their encounter but had to realize he was right. It was nothing more than a drink. Still, she wanted to accuse him of behaving like it could be anything more but then she remembered he wouldn't hesitate to turn her words against her.

"Have you ever been in love?" he asked suddenly.

She gaped at him, a slight color on her cheeks as she scrutinized him. He was mildly curious, nothing more. Somehow it was terribly absurd that he wanted to know something like this, but then she remembered what a pervert curiosity he found in every minuscule- personal, intimate or completely innocent- detail of her life.

She narrowed her eyes, trying to recall it, face by face trying to judge if it was love of just something resembling it but Rippner interrupted her thoughts with a chuckle.

"I think it says it all. If you need so much time to think."

"Um, maybe you're right. I've been infatuated, not once, that's sure…" she admitted reluctantly. It was so hard to judge her past feelings after the enormous two-year gap in her social life, after the complete emotional annihilation. Maybe she had been in love before but its imprint in her heart had faded long ago. Rippner didn't have to know about it, though; somehow she was sure he wouldn't stop pestering her about clinging to that certain horrible memory. "And you? Are you capable of it?"

She didn't ask if he had been in love, she was sure about the answer. The question would have sounded ridiculous anyway. He looked at her with mild confusion.

"Of what?"

"Love. Have you ever had a crush at all?" This time she was the scornful one, letting him know how unnatural she deemed him, how abnormal.

Rippner avoided her gaze, suddenly feeling almost naked in front of her scrutinizing stare. He had no words for those eight weeks he'd been following her but that was the closest thing to a crush, he guessed.

She misinterpreted his silence. "Yeah, I guessed so. Not even with that on-and-off woman?"

For some reason, Lisa pictured a kickass woman with a perfect face and killer body, exciting and tough. She had to be if he was going back to her from time to time. The unnamed sensation that accompanied the thought was out of scope of any analysis right now.

He laughed a bit drily and cynically, but his sarcasm was directed to the other woman or the question itself, not to Lisa. "No, not by far. That was nothing more than convenience. She was at hand, and I was at hand for her, too. That's all. Winding down after assignments, we both knew it didn't have to be labeled in any other way. Fortunately, I'm incapable of anything more."

"No, you're not. It's a question of decision; partly, at least. You just don't let yourself."

"It's better this way. More convenient."

"Safer, you mean. Otherwise, it would turn out your heart can break, too."

He glared at her but not because of her bold words – it was a sensation very close to foreboding. He narrowed his eyes, inwardly shaking his head, trying to get rid of the feeling. She was making him go crazy with the endless questions and guesses. He hated it that she felt entitled to dissect him. It was only his privilege, for God knows what reasons.

"Is that you're afraid of? Or what is it?"

Incredulously, he snapped. "Afraid? Are you mental?"

"I've created a secluded life, devoid of any close relationship. You did the same."

"My life is not secluded."

"Yes, it is. Not physically, of course, but still it is."

Lisa was insistent, and never before so confident. She eyed him closely. Maybe he really was just as much lonely as she was, it just didn't bother him that much, not consciously at least. It crossed her mind that he probably didn't even know how different things could have been. As professional and cruelly correct he could be at manipulating people as emotionally and socially underdeveloped he appeared to her in his own life. It was a stretch but sometimes he seemed like a machine programmed to recognize and analyze emotions, conclude what other emotions they could generate but it was all analytical; the machine wasn't able to feel what it was taught. And when it met an unexpected response that wasn't in accordance with the predefined binary relations, it produced a malfunction mostly in the form of a fierce lash-out. He was always so keen on being in control over everything, an assignment, a situation, a victim, himself and his whole life that when he was faced with emotions within himself, he responded in the same manner as he did with any other things: a despair-driven rage. She knew it for a fact that not being able to control himself was the ultimate defeat, the greatest fear for him. There was a reason why he swept out every possible emotion in his life, and why he despised her for hers. They could be a major obstacle in his job in seeing and thinking clearly- just as it happened in her house- but it was still just as much unhealthy. He couldn't possible plan to live his entire life this way.

On his part, Rippner chose to ignore one of his own revelations from the time of the surveillance that played a big part in the ridiculous feeling of connection he imagined between them: they were loners. The mere fact that she didn't let anyone in her life created an image in his mind that because he didn't let anyone in his either, it made them, well, with the lack of better words, _belong_ together. She had been right before: he _was_ pathetic.

Lisa leant over the arm-rest, and from a foot stared at him with her unwavering green eyes. "I had a reason for it. What's yours?"

"Unlike you, I don't need a reason."

"Bullshit."

She dismissed the remark with a flippant wave, and ignored the impending danger gathering in his eyes. She enjoyed the moment because this was the first time she could sneak anywhere near the core of his personality, and studying him through magnifying lenses was absolutely irresistible. She turned the tables, and suddenly understood why he liked doing it. The wind of dominance and control was dizzying.

"What made you so insecure that you chose this way to eliminate every source that could take you there again?"

"Insecure?" he choked out, and suddenly a rush of blood flooded his mind. "Stop trying to analyze me, it won't work. You have enough issues on your own, go and weep over those."

"Good to see you're just as much uncomfortable with talking about yourself as I am when you're forcing me to," Lisa stated with satisfaction, and it was all he could do to stop himself from strangling her.

Before he knew it, his body reacted by leaning forward to stand up and leave. He froze in the middle of the movement, balanced on the edge of the chair, knowing full well she could read in his body language, if not that properly as he could in hers. She was frighteningly, intriguingly in synch, on the same wavelength with him, like a receptor she could flawlessly pick up his mood, flow with it or oppose it, depending on her current spirit – the resolution, the accuracy she kept digging in his personality was off-putting, especially considering the short time she'd known him. With her perception perfectly tuned up to sense his, she gave him a taste of his own method again, and suddenly he had a very uncomfortable feeling that he would never be able to hide from her properly again. He wasn't sure how and when it started but he didn't like the development at all.

"I'm not uncomfortable. Your random guessing is laughable and tedious, that's all."

"Sure." And she had this annoying little smile over her lips that looked utterly familiar. She had been spending too much time with him, that was his first thought. The punch line was delivered with the same borrowed smile. "Why were you following me for eight weeks?"

Rippner stared at her warily, and his cautiousness made her heart jump around joyously and a bit gleefully. "It was my job, you forgot?"

"I mean why for so long?"

The perpetual indicator of his temper, the muscle in his jaw gave a sign again. In any other time she would have cringed with anxiety but now she pushed all her frustration, hurt and offense she'd had to suffer from him into examining him; and just then, Lisa realized she wasn't afraid of him. She doubted she would ever be again.

"Keefe changed his plans several times. I really don't know what you're aiming at."

"Is it a perversion of yours? Like peeping at other people? That's your secret fetish?"

He was rendered completely, deliciously, satisfactorily speechless, and she smiled at him with silent laughter in her eyes.

Lisa had no idea how close she was, though his voyeurism, as Rippner usually referred to it hatefully (the sarcasm, in fact, took away the edge of the meaning behind it), had been developed only in connection with her. He stood, grabbed the blanket and stepped to the balcony door. His next comment couldn't have sounded less convincing to his ear.

"Believe me, if it was, I would have chosen a different subject."


	10. Siren song

_I turned the UST up a notch or two in this chapter, hope you don't mind it:P _  
_My fave X-men couple makes a small cameo here, viva X-men: Evolution!_  
_Thanks for the kind reviews, as always!_

* * *

**Chapter 10: Siren song**

"If you continue down this road, you get in the town. There isn't much there, maybe a fine line of small shops and restaurants. I'd recommend Buffalo Joe's Pub. In daytime, they serve quite good food, in the evening it's a perfect place for a night-out," the young receptionist girl, all enthusiastic and vigorous, blabbered. Lisa could tell she was happy to see some guests around for the place didn't seem too packed. Actually, they too ended up there only after Rippner took a wrong turn somewhere in north Texas.

Lisa could easily tell the girl- Kitty, according to the nametag- wasn't a professional, but she was very helpful and open, without being flirtatious; she could only roll her eyes in total disgust when they started to talk to Rippner like they were in some bar waiting for a good enough guy to pick them up – her professionalism cried out in pain at this outrageous display of amateur obscenity; at the Lux she'd not once regulated girls for the same behavior. It didn't quite save the situation when Rippner and his overdeveloped ego would readily play along in the game.

"Thanks," Lisa smiled at her, and scribbled her fake signature on the bottom of the registration form.

"I have the afternoon shift. If you need anything, I'm here till eight. After that you have to deal with Mr. Logan, our gruff night watch," she chuckled, clear blue eyes twinkling at a seemingly inside joke. Lisa returned the smile. Rippner only nodded just bordering impatience.

"I'm going on a run," he said a few minutes later when they loaded their luggage in the room. He pulled out a t-shirt, muscles trembling in anticipation. The last time he could go jogging was likewise in Texas: the evening before the flight. Sitting in the car for endless hours finally got on his nerves. And for some reason, right now he couldn't bear the thought of staying with Lisa in a closed place.

Lisa looked at him puzzled and a bit annoyed that he beat her at it. Not for the first time, their physiological needs matched again. She wanted to go too, though she wasn't sure her wound would appreciate it, but going with him like they belonged together was out of question, so she simply nodded.

Pocketing his phone, he exited their room. He was expecting a call soon, if everything went according to his hopes. The day before he'd had an extended call with his ex-manager. Among many other things, he had to brief Henry about the shootout at the bank. For some reason, he opted for leaving Lisa's participation out of the story; the last thing he needed was having Henry doubt his motives about her; truth be told, it was enough that he started to doubt his own motives himself. For all they knew, she was his hostage, and he wasn't about to let them know it wasn't entirely true.

When he came back after an hour that Lisa spent sulking, a lively color and a fine sheen of perception on his face, he went right in the bathroom to take a shower.

Lisa wanted to kick the TV off the stand with its uninteresting programs, infomercials and pathetic talk shows. She was tensed with pent-up energy, and when Rippner emerged from the bathroom, he didn't look less stiff either. He was clad in the pants he'd gone running in, and a towel around his neck, and Lisa immediately turned away, biting back a harsh comment on his appearance or that he should have not forgotten to bring his change of clothes in. She hugged her knees and pressed her chin against them. The last thing she wanted was a fight with him that would escalate who knows where again; and it wouldn't have been fair anyway, to lash out against him only because he was the only available punching bag around. Recently their verbal wars left her more drained than relieved of tension.

Unbeknownst to him, his thoughts were perfectly in synch with hers. Weighing things up, her expression, his own state too, just to avoid that they would get to the point when they would start a quarrel in order to steam off a bit, Rippner offered: "You want a night out? Go somewhere?"

Her head snapped up, and awkwardly she remarked. "You know I'm not quite that kind."

"I was thinking of going out and drinking something, Just to relax, that's all."

He looked like he would go anyway, with or without her, and the thought of being locked up alone in a twenty square meters motel room made Lisa sick.

"Okay, maybe that wouldn't hurt much."

She hadn't quite stocked clothes for clubbing, so she had to resort to wearing jeans with her brown leather boots, topping it with a checkered form-fitting shirt. For this godforsaken town the cowgirl style was just good enough. She had no make-up with her, just a tube of lip balm with a slightly pink tone, and somehow the lack of mascara, even if she would usually apply it very lightly, made her feel naked now. Rippner seemed to be on thorns when she exited the bathroom, ready to go. When Lisa saw he opted for wearing casual and had chosen a steel-blue golf shirt with dark grey jeans and sneakers, she relaxed a bit.

They ended up at Buffalo Joe's for it seemed the only place that attracted people, otherwise everything around it resembled a ghost town. It was well past ten but the place looked already reassuringly packed. They could find two empty seats at the counter. A rocker-looking guy juggled the discs around, providing blaring music for the quite colorful crowd.

The first half hour was spent with fishing for one of the bartenders' attention to order a drink and trying to strike up occasional conversation that only left them with a hoarse throat. The other half of the hour went by with watching others and dropping funny- sarcastic, if it was made by Rippner- remarks about them. Lisa tried, in vain, to get used to the awkward situation that she was spending a night in a pub with Jackson Rippner of all men. He, on the other hand, was perfectly comfortable with it: she didn't know but for him it wasn't their first leisure time together; he had been there with her in her favorite corner café, always there, behind her back, retreated in the shadows and watching her. This evening was special, and he reveled in the possibility that another chapter of her life got to be shared with him.

The two bottles of Bacardi Breezer (for, as Lisa had stated, she'd never drink a vodka cocktail again, especially not in Rippner's company) had taken their toll on her, and she excused herself to spend a good quarter of an hour in the line by the Ladies'. As she pushed her way back through the mass of dancing people, someone yelled over the music.

"Hey, girl. Uh, Audrey."

Lisa shoved her way forward when she remembered her fake ID and the fake name on it. Looking around, she spotted the young receptionist girl from the motel waving at her. She was alone among the people dancing, her long brown ponytail bouncing along with the rhythm. Lisa scurried to her.

"Hey, hi, Kitty."

Beaming, the other girl leant closer and shouted. "Glad you came. You're here alone or with that handsome boyfriend of yours?"

"Who?" Lisa gaped at her, momentarily confused before realizing she was referring to Rippner. "Uh, no, he's not my boyfriend!"

Not even pretending to be convinced, Kitty squinted at her. "Uh-huh, right."

"Really! We booked a twin bed room."

"Indeed. I admit I was pretty surprised."

"He's just… a friend." The word had a very strange taste on her lips that she couldn't grasp.

"If I were you, I'd change that," Kitty winked, laughing, that made Lisa blush equally from embarrassment and frustration. Maybe because she sensed it, or simply got thirsty, Kitty grabbed her hand and pulled her to the counter. "Come on, let's drink something, then show these losers how to dance."

After restocking with Martini this time, they engaged in a funny little chat that felt unexpectedly good for Lisa, a nice change after the weeks-long uniquely odd exchange with Rippner. She could practically feel the knots on her communication skills ease and untangle.

"Oh no, here's Lance. Please dance with me!" Kitty clutched her arm, and made their frantic way back to the dance floor.

"Who's Lance? Why?"

"He's the official bad boy of this dirt hole, and never fails to hit on me. Very irritating. Dance with me, otherwise he'd come and pester me."

Craning her neck, Lisa spotted a tall young man with scruffy hair watching the crowd intently. The stereotype of rebellious guys with fingerless gloves and torn jeans. They would have form an interesting couple with the slightly preppy Kitty.

"Oh, okay. But if I were you, I'd let him. He's handsome."

Kitty looked at her, perplexed, then laughed cheerfully. "Okay, I deserved this… Oh, Iggy Pop, yes!" she exclaimed, and there was no way Lisa could back out of dancing with her.

Contented with being the observer yet again, Rippner was fixating Lisa from his spot at the counter. He'd seen her dance only once, in the safe confines of her flat, after drinking two glasses of wine on a boring Sunday evening. With the other girl he identified as their receptionist, they formed a brilliant duo, both of them surprisingly in synch with the music and each other and confident on the floor. The other girl's movements were much of a ballet-dancer, while Lisa had a natural grace in her moves, light, well-balanced. That was when he remembered she had been figure skating in high school. He watched her hips swirl, and turned away.

In the haze of the pulsating tunes in his head, the heat and the lurking effect of the alcohol, Rippner wasn't sure if the call came after a few minutes or hours of uneventful screening from his lookout. Pressing it crushingly to his ear, he yelled in the phone as he pushed his way through the crowd.

"Call me back in ten, I can't hear you now."

He made a beeline for where Lisa was still dancing, smiling at her back and enjoying the moment while she still wasn't aware of him staring. He watched her curls bounce, her arms wave. Her shapely buttocks sway. His guts trembled, twisted in time with her moves. He wanted to go closer, as close as it gets, and in the same time, turn his back and walk away as long as he still was in control of his whole body and mind. It was an out-of-body experience. He saw himself stepping behind her, reaching out; it felt like the hands placed halfway between her waist and hips belonged to someone else. The disconnected feeling clung to him like a thick blanket as he leant to her ear from behind.

"Lisa."

Her body, like an automat, didn't stop moving against his, only slowed down as a sign that she was listening. For a moment, his voice didn't want to leave his throat.

"Gotta make a call. Be right back, you take your time," he shouted over the music, lips brushing against her earlobe. The conscious, practical part of his brain growled at her: _please, just stop moving_.

At his hot breath, a current was dwelling up under Lisa's skin, yearning for a shudder, a release that wouldn't come, swelling to a point where she thought her skin might snap open. For some reason, her high school studies on physics and chemistry seeped in her mind, the collision and discharge of electrons, their free motion creating a magnetic field – she had the bizarre mental image that somehow their electrons, his and hers, got mixed in the proximity. Created something that wanted to break loose. She leant a bit away and turned her head to look at him and confirm she understood. To see if there was something she should worry about.

Two inches. Lisa could feel the scent of his cologne, musky with the addition of his own. She turned in his hold, one hand on his wrist, other lingering around his waist while his was lingering at her back. It was a strange stance, like an embrace where no touch would be made. She craned her neck to reach his ear, nose touching his earlobe timidly.

"Is everything all right?"

Rippner didn't answer for a long moment, only his arms closed the gap, pulling her closer as if he wanted her to hear him clearly. He remained silent because he wanted to prolong the moment, to pretend it was a real hug. As the heat emitting from their bodies mingled together, the temperature in the room seemed to soar into unbearable heights. His words tickled her neck, and her shoulders, on their own volition, brushed up against his.

"Yeah, fine. Nothing to worry about."

He knew that she answered only from her hot breath on his skin. He let his head drop slightly, lips almost touching the skin half-hidden behind her collar, and suddenly he felt unbearably thirsty, choked on an insistent lump in his throat. It would take half an inch, nothing more, and he could taste her.

Lisa let her fingers curl into his shirt. She was so close that her eyelashes fluttered against his sideburn as she blinked. There was something soothing in his scent, and electrifying. In the humid air the locks formed dark crescents at the side of his neck, curling in odd angles; his hair had considerably grown longer in the last almost three months. Lisa felt the goosebumps erupt on her neck when his head nearly hid in the crook of her shoulder. She was close, too close for her comfort. How many Martinis did she have? Alcohol always kicked down a few barriers in her, no wonder she usually tried to drink little in order to stay within the boundaries. She felt her guts twist, squirm like a satisfied cat in its slumber, and she stiffened.

They retreated at the same time. Rippner was smiling slightly, brushed a strand away from her forehead, and left. Gingerly, somewhat disorientated, she turned back to Kitty.

"Just friends, my ass," the girl laughed.

"What?" dragging her mind back to the then-and-there, Lisa blinked at her.

"Come on, _just friends_ don't act like that, girl."

Right then Lisa had no answer to that comment.

: :

Rippner weaved through the crowd with some difficulty. Reaching the entrance, he burst out. The sweat cooled instantly on his skin in the chilly night air. For a long-long minute he didn't know why he came out. His hand found its way to a burning spot below his ear. The spot her nose had brushed against.

"What the hell was that?" he muttered to himself, and never before felt so much at a loss. She let him touch her. She touched him. He exhaled loudly.

The phone in his pants pocket vibrated, and he accepted the call. It was Henry.

"Where the hell are you?"

There was no way he could tell it believably that he took the hostage to a pub. "Long story. What's new?"

"You got green light, Jackson."

He felt a giant weight roll off his shoulders, and suddenly, after two long weeks he could breathe again. "Thanks, Henry, I really appreciate it."

"Good because it was hell of a job to achieve it."

"Yeah, I can imagine. So what's the deal?"

"The guy will watch the show but we need some time to set everything up."

"No problem, Keefe will need time, too. First I have to discuss with him and come back to you with the details." After a long beat of pause, he asked curtly. "What about the other thing I asked?"

"Don't worry, I have men working on it."

"Peachy; it's important. And Henry, call the hunters off my back. I have enough to deal with."

With that, it was settled. He still had another call to do, and making a face, he entered his contact list. Though in Miami it was already the middle of the night, the FBI agent's voice sounded exactly just as usually: gruff. Gruffly sober, to be precise.

"I can't believe my eyes, Rippner. Are you bored that you decided to give me a call?"

"Can't ever be bored that much," Rippner scoffed flippantly.

"Where are you now?"

"On a Caribbean island sipping cocktails. Wanted to send you a postcard but sadly I don't know your address," he mocked. The answer was a long silence as if Alvarez were weighing the chances of him telling the truth. Rippner could tell how it annoyed the agent that he couldn't follow their route anymore.

"What do you want?"

"I got green light."

The silence now was just as much satisfied as surprised. "Unbelievable, actually."

"For you. So, how much time you need to arrange things?"

"First I gotta talk to Keefe but he just set off on a West Coast tour today, so it won't happen anytime soon."

"What? Are you kidding? What kind of a damn timing is that?"

"You know, Rippner, he couldn't just sit around and wait for your call. He's got a job to do."

"Then he should postpone the tour."

"Wouldn't it be just suspicious? It's been announced for some time now. He can't be expected to adjust his life to a criminal's liking."

Swallowing back a rude comment, Rippner rubbed his forehead. "When does he come back?"

"The last day is the 25th but since that's a Friday, our show can't run before the Monday afterwards."

"But it's still two weeks! What am I supposed to do for two more weeks?"

"Let's see: what you've been doing so far?" the snicker was apparent in the agent's voice.

"Fuck you."

"Manners, Rippner, manners."

Rippner pulled the phone away, giving it a death glare. Alvarez was clearly enjoying his little pathetic revenge.

"And you could start it with letting Ms. Reisert go."

Gritting his teeth, Rippner barked in the phone. "You wish. She stays until I say otherwise. Call me when you have news."

He pocketed the phone, and glared in the darkness. He could tell it was uncomfortably cold by the soft puffs of air as he exhaled, but his anger served as burning fuel in his veins. He was so deadly tired of running across the country, and the thought that he had to do it for yet another just as long period made his head go numb.

Back inside, he slipped past the receptionist girl who was now dancing with a scruffy looking rocker guy – Lisa was nowhere in sight. As he approached the counter, he finally saw her slouching on her barstool. And on _his_ stool there was some guy who was politely but persistently hitting on her. Though Lisa was smiling, her eyes shot across the crowd tensely, edgily. The guy was holding her hand, obviously trying to invite her to dance.

At the scene, something flared up in him, mixed together with the frustration and fury still lurking in his chest after the phone calls, and it doubled his pace. That idiot was touching her; she wouldn't want to go to dance with that clown, there was no way she wanted anything-

He stopped the thought in mid-sentence, and with that, he stopped walking too, it was such a powerful refusal of that train of thoughts. Puzzled at himself as to why he felt such a killing, unreasonable animosity for that stranger, why he cared what Lisa was doing, he was ready with the answer: _I don't trust her._ For all he knew, she could be betraying him again just right now. Satisfied with this reasoning even if an outright honest part of him knew she'd have had enough opportunity to do so in the previous hours, he resumed his approach, developing a solid block of anger for both the man and Lisa.

He was taken off-guard by the strained, wavering, anxious half-smile Lisa was trying to maintain. With him, she never used it. She was either apeshit pissed or honestly smiling, never this unsure, alarmed politeness, _faked_ politeness, and it made him proud somehow. How the hell that idiot could not catch it?

"Get lost, fuckhead."

Lisa tossed up her head, her lips parting with a surprised expression. Rippner could see her shoulder slump a bit in relief. Unlike him, she seemed to be less annoyed by his sudden Neanderthal behavior than he was.

The guy narrowed his eyes and gave him a very critical once-over. He was taller, more muscular, a bit younger, too, with an open, vigorous but painfully average face. Rippner wanted to grab his bottle of beer off the counter and ram it in that very face. The guy blinked at him with hurt annoyance then looked at Lisa.

"Is this creep your boyfriend or what?"

An unexpected warm rush of pleasure rolled over Rippner's stomach and looked at Lisa, too. She gulped, completely taken aback.

"No-"

It was a natural reflex, a gush of air that burst out of her lung at her astonishment. She bit down on her tongue as the realization hit her that if she said no, there was no way she could fend off this guy without a show, if she said yes… no, she just couldn't; the implication per se drew a blush on her face. Both men were waiting for her reply with taut muscles.

"No, he's not a creep," she blurted out eventually, correcting herself quite clumsily. "Ah… and yes… um, I mean, yeah, he is."

She stammered hard, unable to bring herself to say the word. Desperately, she tried to avoid Rippner's gaze and the smirk she was sure he was wearing.

"Oh, you could have mentioned that."

"You didn't ask," she whispered softly. The guy nodded and fortunately without another word grumpily disappeared.

None of them budged. Lisa risked a look at Rippner. He was simply staring at her, unblinking, his face more closed than she'd ever seen it before. His eyes flashed, and with a calm though terrifying tone, he remarked.

"I'm sorry if he was your type." He pondered if there was any attribute on her Mr.-Right-list that matched him – somehow he very much doubted it.

Lisa stared at him in return, trying to comprehend the meaning of the words and match it with that guy's face-_ how did he look like?_-, any face that could be her type but wasn't able to. All she saw was Rippner's stern face. She shook her head, more as a disapproval addressed to herself than as an answer to him.

Absently, her fingers reached out and smoothed down his collar. _He was nothing like you._ She didn't know if it was meant to be good or bad. After all, it was true. That guy couldn't achieve what Rippner had managed to at the airport. Sometimes she doubted anyone could ever do it again. She knew already when she'd joined him at the Tex-Mex that he changed her life forever- if not in the way he eventually did-, even if they'd never meet again, even if he turned out a self-righteous businessman she could not stand – in a way he actually did. That he could pull her out of the years-old shell she'd built around herself with a few awkwardly arrogant yet charming words and enchanting smiles was a fact that nothing would have changed, and had it all happened otherwise between them, he would have opened her up for other acquaintances for the future, no matter what. The will for a change had been born in her in that airport restroom, drenched in iced Starbucks mocha.

As it happened, she closed up yet again, but the irrevocable change she'd foreseen was still there, though in other gruesome form. She'd never been one to believe in fate and wasn't about to start it now, but something in their ways was apparently beyond their control.

Rippner tensed, still gazing at her intently. A gulp, he wet his lips with an agitated flicker of his tongue – that touch, she shouldn't have touched him, looked at him in a way that let his mind roam into fucking fantasy land, seeing things where nothing was there to see. He fixated her lips, the soft creases across them. Being mindlessly attracted to her would put the lid on it all. It was already complicated enough.

He pushed past her, sat on the stool. Waved at the girl behind the counter, and rasped for a Scotch, double. Or triple might have been better. The girl poured it for him, said something, smiled- glossy lips, _non-green_ eyes, nice cleavage-, but he could only stare, not really seeing her. When exactly was the last time he fucked someone? Hell, he hadn't even jerked off for months. The prison wasn't a major turn-on, neither was the hospital. It's not that he hadn't been on a longer off-sex period, he could control his body, the ideal of self-restraint he was, but right now it was simply unbearable. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. In the mirror behind the counter he caught Lisa watching him. _Jesus, I look fucking pathetic. Get a grip, you idiot…_ He turned away from her, not wishing to see their reflection, her puzzlement. Her damn face, damn lips. All he wanted-

A mental pause. A deletion process. Then rewording.

He felt like beating the crap out of Mr. Average. Or better, letting the guy beat the crap out of _him_.

In the awkward, heavy silence between them, Lisa excused herself to the restroom. He stared after her with a sense of loss. _Good going, asshole._

He just couldn't untangle his own thoughts, and it was unnerving. Maybe he had one too much drink.

A hand on his lower back, slipping across it woke him from his reverie.

"That was fast," he remarked but caught the reflection in the mirror. It wasn't Lisa. He only belatedly realized she would never touch him like that. Wanted to say: would never touch him _at all_, but it wasn't true anymore.

The hand belonged to a lewdly dressed girl, not more than twenty. With a confidence he usually valued, she occupied Lisa's stool without asking for permission. He couldn't _not_ notice inwardly that the hand was not only left on his body but it fluttered to his leg, higher than the knee to be just accidentally friendly.

"You say I should go slower?" she smiled mischievously. Rippner smiled, too.

"Would never say anything like that."

"Good. You mind me sitting here?"

"What do you think?"

"I think you look like you could use a little caress."

"Do I?" He was amused. His eyes ran along her body, and his mind gave an approval. _This one will do_. His body definitely agreed with the decision. "Depends what kind of caress you have in mind."

"I'm open to any suggestions."

The girl leaned closer, supported her weight on his chair – right between his legs. She gave a perfect view into her clothes, too. So predictable. So cheap. Rippner knew it, in a way despised it too but as his gaze dropped to the hand, to the cleavage, he found it hard to gulp down the feeling uncoiling in his loins. Hell, he wasn't made of metal, after all…

They were talking about something absolutely uninteresting, going in circles closer and closer to the same target but his mind wasn't quite on the conversation – right then, his bodily needs overruled every coherent thought.

Suddenly he realized Lisa was standing beside them. She stared at the hand on his thigh, the other between them, then up at the girl. With a cold, collected stare her eyes bore into his.

"You take that offer, I'm tired, I go back," she said. As if anticipating his protest, she added. "I can manage it alone, no worries."

"Lisa, wait," he stood nonetheless.

She looked over her shoulder with an empty smile. "Take your time."

And with that, she disappeared in the crowd. Her head was pounding even when she left the pub with its blaring stereos. She gulped down the biting cold. Her face was on fire. That scene back at the counter that was now surely unfolding into something with a mature content warning made her heart clutch. On a deeper level she envied that kind of girls. No, she wouldn't be so slutty, never the one night stand type, but the easiness, the carelessness with what they could enter a physical contact left a strange longing in her. To touch and be touched without worries, without inhibitions. Without memories.

She started back to the motel blindly. She felt horrible. Never in the previous two years had this once occurred to her, that and many other things that seemingly popped up out of nowhere during this goddamn journey. Rippner made her hate what she had, what she'd achieved with steely determination, and she was left to yearn for what she'd lost and never could gain back.

"I hate you," she mumbled to herself, and had no idea who it was addressed to: Rippner or her.

: :

How they could find an empty booth in the back of the pub was a miracle. It was a strategically perfect place, enveloped in dark and the bench hidden behind the table. What was happening _under_ the table was hidden, too.

The girl wasn't wasting their time, and Rippner appreciated it. She kissed him hungrily, sighing in his mouth but he broke away and drew a wet line down her neck with his tongue. He found kissing too intimate for this encounter (did she tell at all what her name was? Not that it mattered, really); that she had her hand in his pants wasn't considered intimate. He almost came simply by her unashamed touch down there. He leant in her neck, nibbling at the soft skin. Her scent was too intrusive. The way she moaned, explicit, over-faked, kept snapping him out of mood. Her hands moved expertly, though. His body tensed, anticipating the much needed release.

_Would she catch a cab? Does she have enough money with her at all? _For some reason, his mind seemed to venture elsewhere. He groaned in frustration, luckily the girl thought he did it in pleasure. He buried his face in her hair, closed his eyes against its blondeness. Its _wrongly_ blondness.

_What if she went back on foot? What if Average Guy followed her back to the motel?_ He grabbed her hips and bit down on her shoulder, angry with himself. _For fuck's sake, she'll be alright._ Under the tank top, his fingers dug in the soft flesh of her breast, and the girl emitted a long stretched whimper of delight, moving onto his lap. _Lisa wouldn't make such a cheap sound. _

That was unexpected. That made him freeze. The girl sensed it only five seconds later.

With sinking stomach, he realized something.

"Sorry… I can't… can't now," he raked his hair with an annoyed yet sheepish movement. "Shit, I'm an idiot. Shit."

Undeniably annoyed, the girl pouted. "I'm not that girl, that's the problem, right?"

Rippner laughed tensely, and untangled their limbs.

"You have no idea." Of what, even he couldn't determine. The sarcasm he wanted to force into his voice was strangled by his pent-up but bound arousal. "That's not the case. Not by far."

He stood up rigidly, adjusted his jeans, shirt. He had to find her before… before… _fuck_… there was not a damn coherent thought in his head, it seemed all the blood had gone south and his mind was hibernated.

"You know, do yourself a favor, go and fuck her."

He wanted to say something biting and rude, but what eventually left his lips was completely different. "It's not that simple with her."

"Oh it is. I've seen her face."

_You are a stupid bitch_, he thought with contempt, and without a single word turned away and left hurriedly. He dashed out of the pub, frantically looking around for the Bentley when after a numbing moment of complete confusion he realized he was driving an Audi now.

He jumped in the car, and drove wickedly down the road toward the motel. It was fairly dark, the lamp-posts were placed quite far from each other, leaving the part of the road between them obscured.

There was no sign of Lisa. Rippner was already halfway to the motel when he realized she couldn't get this far in such short time. She had either hitch-hiked which he pretty much doubted or-

His mind refused to let other possibilities come forth. In increasing panic, he turned the car with screeching wheels, and barreled back to the club, keeping an eye on either side of the road. She was nowhere, absolutely nowhere. _Fuck, fuck, fuck._ His mind was in frenzy. What if some drunken thug found her? What if she was receiving her second mark on her skin right now while his head was all full with screwing some loose chick? He wanted to kick himself he was so disgusted. Lisa was, in a way, his responsibility now. And no one was to touch her again. No fucking one. _Not even you, right?_ he growled at himself.

At least, he didn't have a hard-on any more.

He felt impotent, and in his helplessness floored the pedal, willing the car to go faster. _Lisa_. He pulled down the window to make his head clear. _Think, you fucker, think._ He reached the pub, skirted it. Maybe there was another way back to the motel. Maybe she was simply lost. The Scotch- wait a minute, how _much_ Scotch exactly- played a house party in his head. He groaned: the sound of a caged, wounded beast. His head was pounding with myriads of kettledrums, his heart, too. _Lisa. Lisa._ There was a sentence in his head that the tiny rational part of his mind that was still working strangled in despair: _I can't- _What exactly he couldn't do- find her, leave alone, _lose_ her?-, he didn't want to find out.

He almost liquefied in the seat, disappeared in the pores in his utter relief when he caught sight of her. She was strolling down the road, hands in her jacket pockets, and looked all right. A loud groan burst out of him, and suddenly he felt light-weighed, light-headed. Slowed the car beside her while his heart slowed, too. Lisa didn't stop, simply looked at him from the corner of her eyes.

"You chose the wrong way, Leese."

Drily, she remarked. "Well, weren't you just _quick_?"

"Got called off. The restroom was occupied. I like it there the best."

Her expression darkened, chose not to comment on it, not to react at the remark that brought out horrible memories. Always the tactless, always the utterly cruel; she wasn't about to let him have the satisfaction of seeing her hurt.

"She must be _so_ crushed right now."

"Oh, you can bet on that," Rippner added smugly. "You're not jealous, are you?"

Incredulously, Lisa glared at him, and dropped it bitingly. "Aren't you a tad bit too full of yourself?"

A sudden foul mood descended upon him. "Get in the car." Lisa proceeded stubbornly. "Want me to spell it out for you?"

Lisa glared at him, hearing the much hated intonation, the stretched syllables. "Piss off!"

Stepping on the brake, Rippner stopped the car, got out, and halted before her, blocking her way. With a mean tone, he sneered at her.

"Well, aren't we just childish?"

He reached out to guide her to the car but Lisa scurried from his touch with a repulsed face. Now he could read in it easily: it was 'don't-touch-me-with-those-hands' written all over her face.

"I'm not childish. I feel like walking. Alone."

"Lisa, this place isn't the best for wandering around _alone_." With a pointed, collected look he scooped down to her eye-level. His reasonable tone that was lacking now any patronizing edge soothed her in an unexpected way. "Get in the car, let's go back to the motel, okay?"

Pursing her lips she glared at him, silently blaming him for the effect he had on her, and without a word she walked to the car and got in. They were already near the motel when Rippner spoke.

"Were you interested in me? Back at the airport."

The question wasn't smug or teasing. He looked only genuinely curious and slightly excited. Her first reaction was a knee-jerk denial. She lifted her head and her mouth betrayed her.

"Yes. But it was in another life."

Rippner nodded, a faint soft smile on his lips, and she waited for him to trample on her heart, her pride and self-esteem. She looked in her lap, at the twisted knot of fingers; why she had to give herself away? In the silence nothing came, no self-righteous smart remark, and her heart sang to her a question that she'd never dared to even formulate in her head.

"Was it part of the plan that you'd buy me a drink?"

Their gazes locked. She saw him hesitate, then, a truth for a truth, quod pro quo, exchange of unwillingly offered secrets, he admitted:

"No, I think I was interested in you, too. After following you for-" he cut off the sentence, remembering how she hated being reminded of that, and how foul it sounded anyway. He hated to remember it, too. "I wanted a close to normal interaction before-"

Another taboo, the assassination plan. He groaned inwardly. Christ, had anything normal they could talk peacefully about happened then?

"I wanted to observe you up close, first-handed, grasp what I hadn't been able during those weeks, grasp something I knew was there: the essence that eventually became my undoing. I was intrigued, you were a real challenge. All those weeks I had seen how you treated men who tried to get closer to you. I didn't understand your reaction but wanted to know if it could be different with me, if I could get past your shields."

Lisa wanted to dissolve into thin air. She felt so embarrassed, so horribly used like a lab rat. It seemed he knew for sure how attracted she'd been, knew exactly that he was the only one she'd given a chance. The hint that she meant nothing but a challenge for him made her even bitterer.

"Well, you can be satisfied with yourself. Does it flatter you to know you successfully pulled that deception on me?"

In the ensuing silence, Rippner parked the car in front of their motel, and stared out at the empty, dark parking lot.

"I didn't want to hurt you. Not with that, at least. I didn't know about…"

With a whole world of doubt in her eyes, she measured him. "Really? Would it have been different if you knew my past?"

"I guess. On the plane, definitely. I would have restrained from physical contact, to begin with, since you obviously despise it. Everything would have been different because that was the essence, the very thing I tried to find out, the core from which what you really are had emerged."

"And the drink?"

Contemplating the answer, a small smile spread on his face. "I think I would have still invited you."

_I think_... What a hypocrite, he seethed at himself. He was _damn sure_. There was no way he could resist it, resist her. Resist the question, the possibility to find out whether she'd be interested in him; whether she'd be true to him or fake and artificial. He'd had a faint, honest suspicion back then that he was, in a way, infatuated with her. His whole being had been aching for having a true and private moment with her, he remembered how anxious, how eager he'd been while waiting for her to arrive at the airport, how his muscles were contracted in anticipation. He could still recall the dizziness within his head that had seeped in at the unreality of the situation- the stalker and the mark face to face, seeing each other-, the possibility that, even if for only a half hour, she would see him for a normal man, for someone she could-

He forced the train of thought to stop. She still had this power over him, making him lose focus; she increasingly did so, not that he thought.

Lisa unbuckled her belt, and by the forceful movement Rippner could tell she was surprisingly upset with his answer.

"Of course. Your self-assurance had to be sated… You're not really sorry then," she hissed bitterly, and climbed out of the car.

Rippner threw his head back with an exasperated sigh. He was blind all right, deliberately so. But she was blind, too.

: :

"No, not another cabin," Lisa wailed, slumping against the car seat.

Rippner shot her an annoyed look but didn't react in any other form. He needed a place where they could stay for more than a night, a place that was safe enough. He was terribly tired of the whole dashing across the country scenario, and even more so now, knowing that it wasn't over anytime soon. When he'd informed her about the new development- if it could be called that-, she seemed more upset about the prospect of another of his choice of safe haven than the fact that she had to stick around with him for two more weeks. That, too, aggravated his bad mood for no real reason, and he took an angry gulp from the coffee.

"There's no one you could trust?" Lisa chanced, hoping to convince him about the unnecessary choice of a dirty hideaway off the map. They were crossing Colorado, heading west, and there wasn't much to see. The sunset wrapped the rural landscape in a flaming red glow.

"Depends on the level of trust."

"Trust with your life?"

Smugly, he nodded. "There's one. And it's me."

She uttered a sound, a snort somewhere between contempt and pity, saying 'what a sad life, that is', and Rippner glared at her.

"You're one to talk. Is there anyone beside your family, which is given, who you could trust with your life? Let me see: your dentist? Definitely not. Your shrink? Oh, I forgot you only _should have_ one."

"And you should have an _army_ of them, psychopath," she prompted. He went on as if no interruption had been made.

"Your occasional cocktail-night friends who are so full of their own problems, the kid catching flu, breaking up with actual shithead boyfriend, quarrelling with asshole boss, that they don't ever think of asking you about yours? Not that you would tell them, we both know it, but at least they could try. So would you trust any of them?"

Lisa wanted to retort, wanted to refute it but with a pang of pain she realized he was right. Turning toward the window she let out a short bark of laughter, full of bitterness: what a pathetic pair they formed.

She had been able to see the course of her desocialization all along. She knew it was wrong but couldn't help it. It turned out to be an irreversible process. Since the trauma two years ago, slowly, inadvertently she'd been distancing herself from others, the layer of social façade she was willing to show and share became thinner and thinner by day, more things dissolving, melting into the inner core that was closed from other people, leaving less and less to display. And then she found herself unable to talk about her feelings other than the mild nuisance she would face at the hotel. Nobody could lure her out – until he came along. What he did was shock therapy. He pried her open with a can-opener, coaxed words, confessions from her in a way no one else could. With force, he cracked the thin layer of unsecret thoughts and let the core gush out, revealed its burning, wound- and hurt-inflicting substance; he sank in it with cold calculation and came out unharmed, unaffected. No one else could do it, no one was perceptive enough, ruthless enough to do so – in that, he was amazing; cruel, lacking compassion but amazing. With him, there was no social layer, no restrained behavior. With him, it was always the lava core. And it was unsettling.

Squinting at Rippner, she watched him edgily sip the coffee with one hand on the wheel. He looked very keen on reaching the cabin quickly. He made them wake up quite early that day after a very late arrival at their last motel the evening before, and with the bluish hue under his eyes he looked pretty tired.

Puckering her lips, Lisa prompted. "You know, Rippner, I have a driving license."

"Okay?"

"I go to work by car every day."

Unsurely, he looked at her from the corner of his eyes. "So? What's your point, Lisa?"

"I could drive sometimes. Who said it always has to be you?"

The silence following her offer could mean a lot of things. She decided she didn't like either of them. Menacingly, Lisa leant forward.

"It better not be one of your male-driven, chauvinist bullshit that women can't drive."

"Fact-based." He was smirking, completely unfazed by the warning in the green sparkles of her glare. Clearing his throat, he added: "No."

"Then?"

"I like driving."

"I like driving, too. You think I can't read a map?"

"It's not about that."

"Then what?"

Sighing, his eyebrows turned into an annoyed slope above his bored stare. "You want another argument, that's why you're bringing this up?"

Lisa laughed coldly. "Oh, what a pathetic attempt to evade the topic, I'm clearly disappointed in you, Mr. Mindbender… I thought you could use some sleep, you look like crap."

"Thanks."

"Anytime. So?"

"No, thanks. Very considerate of you, I'm pretty touched, but no, I'm fine."

"Yeah, I'm sure that's why you're drinking the third cup of coffee today. Like it'd have any effect on you, anyway."

Rippner wasn't even surprised that she knew him that much, down to his physiological parameters. Despite that he wasn't so much against the offer, he made the topic drag on only to taunt her.

"It's not just about mindless driving, Lisa. We have to check if we are followed."

"And you think I wouldn't spot a tail? Unlike you in Missouri, right?"

He groaned. "You'll bring that one up forever, right?"

She had a very annoying smile on her face. "You know you can always count on me… The roads here are practically empty, doesn't take a genius to see if something's off."

"You never spotted me."

Lisa glared at him, and exclaimed with a pissed tone. "Because I wasn't looking for you, you jerk!"

"You've got a point there," Rippner admitted to calm her down. He really had a headache forming.

"Rippner, pull over now!"

"Jeez, all right." He stole a glance at her, and decided it was better if he complied. "If looks could kill…"

As the car came to a halt, Lisa climbed out, and remarked darkly. "It'd be over long ago. Two and a half months ago, actually."

Rippner climber out, too, skirted the front of the car and mumbled morosely. "I always knew you liked me so much."

He was in a foul mood, Lisa could tell it. As they met halfway at the front bumper, she grabbed his wrist with a small smile. "I'm talking about the past, silly. The flight."

Something in her told that it was a wrong thing to say from different aspects – first because it sounded just simply not right considering who he was; secondly, because of the effect it had on him. A teasingly cocky smile lit up on his face, purely self-confident yet captivating, and with his free hand, he brushed a lock behind her ear.

"So you say my irresistible charm finally got to you?"

"Agh, you're unbearable," she slapped away his hand grudgingly, and he laughed.

They settled back in the Audi.

"So, where's the clutch?" she asked jokingly as she adjusted the seat to her height. Rippner did the same with his, and leant against the door.

"Try not to draw attention."

Lisa looked over at him incredulously and started the car.

"What's that supposed to mean, huh? I shouldn't drive topless? Or in zigzag? Backwards maybe?"

He smirked, and Lisa knew she had it coming. "Option one is fine. The other two are ruled out… Give me an hour, okay? Then wake me. One hour, understood?"

"Sure. You think I'll be able to watch the road and pay attention to the clock at the same time?" Her voice was dripping with sarcasm, and he rolled his eyes at its familiarity.

"And if anything's off-"

"Yeah, I'll wake you, jeez."

He chuckled. Sometimes it was like talking to himself.

Lisa, in all honesty, was positively surprised that he actually fell fast asleep. In the growing darkness she could hardly see his face as he turned toward the door; only his calm, deep breathing could be heard above the soft music. She relaxed in the driver's seat, peeked at the map in her lap, and smiled to herself.

It was already pitch black outside when he stirred.

"Had a good sleep, dormouse?"

He was slowly gaining back awareness, and her hands tensed on the wheel. "Mmhm. What's the time? I slept three hours?" he snapped, and glared at her accusingly.

"Yeah, it seems I couldn't split my attention between driving and the clock. Not to mention that suspicious patrol car behind us."

He turned back agilely, and groaned. "Really funny."

"You look way better," Lisa peeked at him. He still looked a bit drowsy but definitely less irritated. "I didn't feel like waking you."

He rested his head on the seat, and frowned at the clear night sky. "Lisa… we're not headed west!"

"Uh, I knew something wasn't right," she cracked cynically, earning a glare from him.

"Why did you turn north?"

"The road did," she smirked, reveling in annoying him.

"It's not another fucking safari, right? We're not going to visit some goddamn marmots?"

"Chill. You remember what my grandma's secret was for long life?"

Dumbfounded, Rippner stared at her. "Huh?"

"Grape-nuts and…?"

He racked his brain. "And… some guy… We're not going to him?"

"Duke. Yeah, we are."

For a moment, he was speechless. When he spoke, Lisa was surprised that instead of an immediate objection, he simply commented: "I thought he lived in Texas."

"He did. After the funeral, though, he moved back to Wyoming. Said the house in Texas reminded him too much of my grandma."

"Lisa, I don't want to get you down but we cannot go to your folks."

She felt desperate to convince him; anything but being locked up in a small cabin with him.

"Why not? It's safe, no one would know it, no one even knows about this place. I'm sure even you didn't have it in your dirty files," she narrowed her eyes at him, checking for confirmation. He simply gave a lopsided grimace. "I haven't been there for years. Before… even before the divorce, my parents were still together. It was one of the last occasions we were a real family," she whispered wistfully. "My brother wasn't still married, and I…"

Lisa didn't finish it but he could easily guess what she was thinking of: she had been a different person back then.

To move her out of the emotional pothole, he asked: "And what exactly are you planning to tell him? Hi Duke, meet my abductor?"

Seriously, with a thoughtful frown on her forehead, she nodded. "Something like that. He would love the set-up story you have here. He's into all these conspiracy theories. Has tons of books about the CIA, KBG and so on."

"I know nothing about JFK's assassination. Or Lennon's."

"Too bad. Then you have to sleep in the garage," she chuckled. "Tonight we have to check in a motel, I don't want to barge in on him at midnight. We can proceed tomorrow morning. Is it fine for you?"

He didn't say anything, simply pressed his temple to the glass and stared ahead. Lisa smirked, realizing that he, wordlessly, reluctantly, approved her plan. It was a small victory to be in control over him.


	11. Gestures

_Here's the next. Tell me if I'm totally off-route with the characters. I have some doubts about this chapter._  
_And thank you for the reviews, as always:)_

_[Edit]: No update, I just corrected a minor thing - thanks, Cypris88, for pointing it out:)_

* * *

**Chapter 11: Gestures**

It was one of those typical suburban streets with plywood houses and neatly cut bushes lining the narrow paths leading to the white painted front doors. A silent, sleepy neighborhood on a silent, sleepy Wednesday morning.

Lisa parked the Audi in front of a house that differed from the others around it in its brick walls and the old but well-kept and obviously cherished dark red 67' Buick parking on its driveway. She smiled as Rippner craned his neck and stared at the car, at the shiny V-shaped grilles that glinted off the sunrays like a kid who'd just seen Santa Claus. The Buick had this effect on most men.

"Okay, you stay here. I go in, talk to him, and if everything's settled, call you in."

He looked at her with an unsure expression, sweeping his gaze across their surroundings. Every minute of the two-hour drive was spent with debating with himself whether it was a good idea to let Lisa take them to her grandmother's… what the _heck_ was this Duke? Anyway, right now he was rather in the less convinced state.

"You don't trust me?"

"I don't trust _anyone_. Especially not you."

There had to be something less serious on his face because her eyes twinkled at him and she gave him an amused smile. "Fair enough."

Lisa cracked the door open, and looked back at him.

"Think you can give me a few minutes without drawing attention?"

She laughed outright at the face he made; she was in her element recently, finding incredible fun in pulling his leg.

Rippner watched her numbly as she strolled to the front door, halted for a long minute squaring her shoulders before knocking with determination. From where he was sitting in the passenger seat, he didn't have a good view at the entrance but could tell the door opened. After a very short conversation, Lisa disappeared from his sight, and Rippner let his head drop back with a frustrated sigh. He just hated not being in control.

In the small hallway of the house the initial shock was unfolding into a happy reunion Lisa was glad for. She hadn't met Duke ever since the funeral and was very relieved that the old man didn't look so devastated as back in the summer. Though they weren't blood relatives, she was always fond of him, mostly because her grandmother had a high opinion of him she never failed to voice. And perhaps because she had very obscure memories of her own grandfather; she was very small when he died, and Duke soon replaced him in their lives.

Duke stared at her, squinting heavily like he thought his eyes might be playing a trick on him. He held her at arm's length, shook his head in disbelief.

"Lisa, dear… I thought… in the news…"

She gave him a chaste hug and smiled. "I know. But don't worry about that, I'm okay. You know you can't always believe what they say."

He shooed her to the kitchen eagerly as though he was afraid she might flee anytime. "Come right in. Want something to eat? Drink?"

"No, no, really. I'm fine."

He sat down heavily, face wrinkling even more as he returned the smile. He was younger by quite a few years than her late grandmother but still well over seventy; however, his vigor was enviable. She'd never asked what _his_ secret and motto were but on some point she probably should.

"Honey, it's so good to see you unharmed. How could you get away?"

"Get-? Oh." Lisa gave him an almost apologetic look. "I didn't. I mean… I'm not captive."

"But… that man, the man from the plane. It was him, isn't it? Your mother told me it was."

Lisa felt her heart scrunch in yearning at the mention of her mother. She had to be so worried. So was surely her father. She couldn't imagine what they had to go through these days. She steeled herself and squeezed the pain out of her system for the moment. It was crucial that she stayed level-headed.

"Yes, it's him but… Actually, I'm here to ask you a favor."

"Anything."

Lisa sighed. Cramped her hand, trying to find the best words that wouldn't alert him and were still believable. "I understand if you say no, so don't worry about that. It's crazy enough even to me. So I… we need a place to stay at for a few days. A place that's safe."

The little word didn't escape his attention, and Duke looked at her puzzled. "We?"

A bit sheepishly, she muttered. "Yeah, the other half of the _we_ is Rippner. The guy from the plane, I mean. He's outside in the car."

Duke had always been more of a philosopher type, his collected, calm demeanor had always fascinated her, and this time wasn't exception. He studied her expectantly, without alarm or doubt, only with tight awareness. "What's this exactly about?"

"I can't get into details because it's confidential but let's just say Charles Keefe has an agreement with him, and they are working on something together."

"A set-up? This whole story on the news is a cover-up?"

Lisa laughed. It wasn't a surprise Duke caught the real meaning so quickly. "Yes, I think it sums it up just fine. So we need someone we can trust, need a place because…well… it's a bit tiring to be always on the run. The police, obviously, aren't initiated into this matter. Wouldn't take longer than a few days."

"Of course, dear, it's not even a question that you can stay." There was a falter in his voice, and the wrinkles doubled on his forehead. "About him, I'm less sure. Are you certain he's no threat to you? He's not forcing you right now?"

Lisa chuckled. "Actually, I'm rather certain he's on the verge of leaving without me. It was my idea to come here in the first place, and he wasn't too enthusiastic about it. You have to know, he's not too trustful. And kind of difficult, too. But I can handle him. No worries."

Duke kept his eyes on her for a long moment before nodding and taking her hand in his large, reassuring one. "I'm just glad you're here."

"Thanks. But I have a condition. If you are not okay with it, that's fine, then we will leave. But if you let us stay, you have to promise me not to tell about us to anyone." Her words felt heavy on her tongue, and above all, in her heart. She tried to maintain a steady glance but inside she quivered with sorrow. "And by anyone I mean everyone. Including my parents. We cannot jeopardize the plans, and we're not sure if their calls aren't monitored."

The understanding went easier than she'd anticipated. Maybe his interest in conspiracy theories was really helping them this time. "Of course. I'm glad you find me trustworthy enough."

Lisa laughed at the twinkling glance he cast her way. Duke stood and peered out the kitchen window. She stepped beside him to check if Rippner was still there, and relaxed as she spotted the Audi.

"You might want to park the car in the garage then. It will be easier to keep it a secret from the neighbors."

Lisa was overly grateful for his practical thinking, and nodded in consent.

: :

The inside of the car seemed to shrink with every passing minute he couldn't glimpse a movement in the house. It could easily happen that Lisa was calling the police on him at the moment while she was barricading herself in some panic room if he chose to barge in on them. Feeling utterly impotent and helpless, he climbed over to the driver's seat to at least give himself the impression he was still in charge. Sitting beside her while Lisa drove had been a blast to his male ego anyway. The street was still silent, and as much as he could tell no one was peeking at the suspicious strange car from their windows but he felt utterly exposed just parking there and waiting for a sign from Lisa. His survivor instincts urged him to turn the key in the ignition and just drive the hell away without looking back but a small part of him- a small, unreasonable and absolutely weak part of him- kept him there, giving her ten more seconds, and five more, and another five. _I'll leave if a dog starts to bark_, he promised himself, _if a car drives by_. He groaned. It was pathetic.

He was about to drive away- or so he told himself- when the front door opened, and an old yet fairly agile man he identified as Duke walked out of the house hastily. Rippner tensed in the seat, hands on the steering wheel, half-expecting the man to bring out a rifle and shoot a .80 caliber hole in his head. Instead the man made a beeline for the Buick, and got in. As the engine of the old car roared into life, gazing at the rearview mirror Rippner saw the garage door open, and Lisa waved at him with a glad smirk, motioning him toward her.

Finally understanding the situation, he couldn't stop a grin from spreading across his face. She pulled it through.

Not that he had doubts she would; no, not for a minute. He shook his head, mocking himself, and chuckled softly. She was incredible.

: :

"Shit."

It wasn't the most optimistic word to start a day with, but as Rippner looked at his watch, at the hour and date, it was the only appropriate reaction he could think of. It was five to ten, and 17 November. He stared up at the ceiling drowsily. He'd had to be dead tired if he slept in so late without waking to any noise made inside the momentarily silent house or outside in the street.

His assigned place for the night was the couch in the living room. Fortunately, though it was old and a bit battered, was wide and long enough for him to be fairly comfortable. The house had two bedrooms, both on the second floor, but one was for Duke, the other for Lisa to stay in. From his part, he was completely all right with the sleeping arrangement.

The previous day went by unexpectedly without any trouble. Duke turned out to be quite a pleasant man who was polite enough not to give him hostile glances for being the number one enemy of the Reiserts but under the surface Rippner could sense Duke was very much sober and alert. He could tell all his words and moves were measured one by one against a moral and ethical code, judged if they were appropriate enough for someone Lisa had to accompany. He didn't mind it till Duke wasn't considered a threat to them. They even engaged in meager conversations but he mostly tried to leave Duke and Lisa alone to discuss whatever family business and memories they felt like sharing with each other. Otherwise everything was calm, and after a while he'd started to feel relaxed enough to set his mind at ease.

Duke was in his late seventies but his gait was enviably vigorous and lively; other than the wrinkled face and the completely white hair, nothing proved that he was well into his age. He seemed to be active both physically and mentally, and though Rippner was pretty sure he wouldn't live such a long life, if he did, he certainly wanted to be in just as good shape as Duke.

Pulling himself out of the makeshift bed, he started toward the kitchen just to find it empty. Wedged under a red phone booth refrigerator magnet- obviously originated from London, maybe a gift from Lisa's mother who frequently visited England-, a short note read: _It's bowling day today, won't be back before late afternoon. Feel at home. D._

Satisfied, Rippner headed for the bathroom, on the way checking on Lisa. Her door was still closed. Obviously, she was sleeping in, too.

By the time he heard her lazy steps coming down the stairs, it was already half past ten and he had just switched off the stove with a satisfied sigh.

"Good- Oh."

Lisa was standing in the doorway, her lips forming a comical 'O' as she stared at the table. Rippner couldn't keep the smugness off his face as the sleepy dullness to her eyes gave way to enthusiastic awe. Not that it was anything special, just an as much wide variety of breakfast meals as he could prepare from the ingredients found in the kitchen. He knew how she loved breakfast, he also knew _what_ she loved to eat then. Actually, it was almost the same for him.

Taking his place by the table, and leaning back in the chair, he watched her drag her feet sluggishly toward him. She sat down opposite him. The smile on her face was one of his favorite.

"You made all this?" Lisa blinked at him, and grabbed the mug of tea in front of her. She inhaled deeply, and closed her eyes. Mint. No sugar. It went without saying.

"You seem surprised. You thought preparing breakfast was beyond my power?" he asked amused.

Lisa honestly wanted to say no but it was just impossible for her to imagine him standing beside the stove and flipping pancakes and French toasts with a spatula. Instead an answer, she filled her plate with whatever she found there: after the hurried or irregular breakfasts they'd had in the previous weeks, it felt like she was sitting at the mythical wishing-table. Everything tasted just perfect.

"Oh God." After clearing their plates in relative but harmonious silence, Lisa propped her chin on her palm, placing her elbow on the table, and looked at him lazily and sated. "I've never thought I'd be once so grateful for a real breakfast."

She sounded neither accusatory nor forlorn, and maybe that was the exact reason why Rippner felt the pang of regret about what he'd put her through: kidnapping her, forcing her to run for her life with someone she didn't trust, didn't like. He'd robbed her of her normal everyday life. And still, she could be grateful for a few pancakes.

He leant on his elbows, watching her engulfed in the steam of her mint tea. Watched the meager sunshine filtered by the lace curtain illuminate the left side of her face, bringing out the red in her hair, emphasizing the dimples when she smiled. He would remember her smile, this particular one, forever. Remember the look she gave him, the relaxed posture she was in. The patch of skin on her right shoulder that stood exposed. Preserving a memory like bottled fruit on the shelf in a larder – that's what he wanted that very instant. For a moment he reveled in the false appearance: with them having breakfast in the scene of a normal house, normal kitchen; like it was real. A feeling was prickling his stomach, making it convulse with pleasure and pain. It was closer to pain, he decided.

She tipped her head to the side, her eyes glinting with playful suspicion. "What's the hidden agenda? Messing with my head again?"

He answered with a cunning smirk from his own repertoire. "Sure. Happy Birthday, Leese."

Lisa blinked, a confused, cautious smile frozen on her face, unsure how to interpret his words. Then her head snapped in the direction of the calendar on the wall, and gaped.

"Oh my, I forgot my own birthday," she laughed, perplexed. There was a glint in her eyes he was surprised to see. "Isn't it just great?"

Rippner cocked his head to the side, and watched her curiously. Actually, she sounded genuinely contented. Maybe she didn't like birthdays; still, another surge of guilt rushed over him. She should celebrate it with her loved ones, not with him – but the selfish bastard he knew he was, he couldn't bring himself not to feel satisfaction at the thought that she had to share this special event with him.

: :

The house had a very practical layout. The living room was the first premise to the left from the short hallway. Its windows overlooked the street, providing enough light all day. Opposite the living room the kitchen opened just beside a door to the garage and a bathroom. Along the back of the house there was a nice open porch with patio chairs and wooden tables under the canopy. The garden it provided a good view at was a bit uncared-for and shabby but the amorphous bushes gave a good cover from prying eyes. From the living room a narrow staircase led to the second floor of the house where two bedrooms and another bathroom were opening from a short aisle. It might be a bit large for a man living alone but with them staying for a few days it was certainly just about the right size.

The situation was new, awkward even, and none of them could properly handle it. That they had a whole house all to themselves and had nothing to do or concentrate on, let it be driving or reading a map or checking for gas stations and tails, they had no idea how to behave around each other. It was a natural reaction that Lisa retreated to her room while Rippner seemingly engaged in work, tapping on his laptop and cell phone, stationed on the couch in the living room.

Lisa emerged from her hideout only in the afternoon to prepare a quick late lunch; nothing complex, rice with chicken strips in pre-prepared sauce. The simple everyday activity was so strange after the unusual weeks on the road that for some time she fumbled around uncertainly before getting the hang of it anew. Though she'd never considered herself a devoted chef, right now she found excitement in the usually avoided activity.

When Lisa poked her head out of the kitchen to announce the lunch was ready, the scene she found in the living room left her a bit surprised: Duke had already returned, and the two men were in the middle of a conversation about anything and everything from politics and history or faraway countries. Smiling to herself, Lisa took the plates to the living room; the kitchen table was too small for three anyway, and had only two chairs. With her own plate she nestled on the end of the couch, and pretended she was reading while with half an eye and ear she tried to follow their words. It reminded her of the philosophical arguments her father used to have with Duke – she liked sitting there and eavesdropping on them; the differences in the two men's personality showing perfectly: Duke had a darker, more disillusioned view of the world, while her father was rather naïve in a lovable way. This time it seemed it was rather Duke who could be called more optimistic as Rippner, no surprise there, was overly skeptical and cynical. In knowledge, he was a match for Duke but it wasn't any surprise for her. It was well into the evening when Duke stood and retreated to his room.

They stayed there, suddenly feeling the walls close in on them. Lisa pushed around the last grain of rice in her empty plate, her senses receptive and tuned to follow his every move. She could feel his eyes on her, the open scrutiny he never failed to give her, and she fidgeted self-consciously. She started as he stood abruptly.

"Come with me," he said, and placing the plate on the coffee table, Lisa followed him a bit puzzled to the screen door leading to the back porch.

For a long moment Rippner gazed through the white mosquito net covering the door from the outside, his eyes unfocused under knitted eyebrows. Lisa remained in silence, not wanting to disturb his thoughts.

"I've got a birthday gift for you but not without conditions."

Unsure, she eyed him curiously. It wasn't surprising anymore that he knew when her birthday was, but that he remembered, cared to remember. Was he really so considerate that he wanted to give her something even though he was apparently reluctant about it? She wasn't sure she wanted anything from him. Anything she would like. Least of all that; anything that would remind her how well he knew her.

"Oh. Okay?"

His right hand sank in his pocket and he held his cell phone out for her. Tentatively, she took it.

"I set up a secure line. You have ninety seconds, no more, and it has to be kept strictly." Seeing her darkened gaze, he added with an amused smirk. "Ninety seconds to talk to your father."

"What?" Lisa couldn't believe her ears, and realized with horror that she felt tears gathering in her eyes at the mere mention of her father.

"I'm sure you heard it just perfectly for the first time," he had an almost arrogant sneer lighting up on his face, but Lisa discovered his eyes had a soft edge to them. Without warning, it was peeled off though, and he looked at her seriously. "The conditions, Lisa: no mention, no hint whatsoever on where we are now because they might be monitoring his calls, no mention about the deal either, about where we are headed. You can make the call on the porch but before the ninety seconds end, I'll knock on the window and you'll have exactly ten seconds to say goodbye. You don't want to know the consequences if you don't keep your part of the deal."

Lisa tried to nod solemnly but her heart danced around in her chest almost painfully. For a crazy, giddy moment she wanted to hug him for letting this happen.

"I'll leave you alone to talk to him freely. I trust you'd follow my orders. Can I trust you, Lisa?"

His eyes bore into hers, and Lisa returned his gaze openly. "Yes." She gulped, her voice shaky and small, and had to repeat the word. "Yes, you can."

Satisfied with her reply, Rippner opened the door for her, and when she stepped outside, closed it gently.

Lisa looked at his outline through the mosquito net, and gripped the phone like it was her only lifeline. Ninety seconds were the world for her now.

She dialed the number with trembling fingers. The measured beeps in the cell danced on her nerves, and she prayed her father was at home and she didn't have to leave another message on the answering machine. She wasn't sure Rippner would let her repeat the call. When the line connected, Lisa almost choked on her own words as her father murmured a very enervated 'hello' in the phone.

"Dad? Dad!" she realized she was yelping, and a bit more collected, she gushed in the receiver: "It's me, Dad."

"Lisa, honey, is that you?" she could literally feel the squashing weight on his heart roll off. Even his voice regained its normal quality, and simply by hearing the usual worry channeled to her, her nerves and muscles soothed like she'd just had the most perfect massage ever. "Are you all right, sweetie? Where are you now? What happened-?"

"Dad, I'm alright. Oh my God, it's so good to hear your voice. I missed you so much. Are you okay? Did you find the message I left on my phone?"

Lisa bit her tongue, realizing she was spluttering, not giving him time to answer her questions. Tears flooded her eyes, blinding her for a moment. This call was going to leave her an emotional wreck, she was already sure of that.

"Yes, I did. I haven't heard of you… I thought you…" Lisa squeezed her eyes shut at the half-said suppositions that got choked in her father's throat. He could hardly speak around the mixture of worry and relief in his chest, she could tell it even from a thousand miles distance. "Where are you?"

"I can't tell you now but I'm at a safe place. Don't worry about me."

"Rippner's keeping you hostage, right? You snatched a phone to make this call?"

"No, no, he let me-"

He didn't even let her finish it. It was one of those occasions when he wouldn't believe her stating she was fine. Actually, it happened more times than not. "Did that son of a bitch hurt you?"

She could hear the unasked word, the hint behind her father's question. Did he do _that_ to you? Harshly, so her father would be convinced but Rippner wouldn't overhear her, Lisa whispered in the phone. "No! Dad, he's okay… I mean, he has issues but he doesn't hurt me."

"If it's so, then you can come home," it was more of a challenge in his voice, a clear belief that she wasn't telling the truth.

"Uh, well, yes, theoretically I could. It's just… I can't talk about this, but I'm here willingly. We have an…um, agreement. There is something we have to do but he doesn't force me. Please just accept what I say."

"He's beside you now, right? Making you to tell this? Whose life is he threatening you with?"

Exasperated, she sighed. There was no way she could make her father calm, but honestly, she couldn't blame him. The news about her kidnap and his own memories of Rippner attacking her in their house didn't quite help her case right now.

"No, he isn't doing anything like that, Dad. I know it's hard to believe me now but just do it. Just this one time. Please."

"When you're coming home?"

"I don't know. Hopefully soon. How are you? Mom? Did you talk to her? Are you okay? Please don't make yourself sick with worrying about me."

There was a short silence on the other end of the phone, she could literally picture him pinching the bridge of his nose so hard that it would leave a red mark there, and when he spoke, Lisa could hear a hitch in her father's voice. "It's your birthday today, honey."

"I know, Dad. That's why I call you now," she said lovingly, though her heart clenched at the misery in his voice.

There was a knock on the glass, polite but firm, and Lisa jerked with a feel of loss. She had to end the call but her heart ached so much that for a moment she was speechless.

"I have to go now. Call Mom, tell her I'm fine. I love you so much, Dad."

She didn't wait for his answer because she was sure there would be no way she could end it in time. End it at all. With a determined punch for she needed all the strength she could muster, Lisa finished the call. She cast an unseeing glance toward the door to let Rippner know she kept her promise, and turned away with a miserable look.

She wasn't sure she sounded convincing enough, but at least her father knew she was alive. For long minutes she was striding up and down the porch, hugging the phone to her chest. Surges of pure bliss and sorrow engulfed her, the concoction so heavy that it left her breathless. Though it was already dark outside which she was very grateful for at the moment, Lisa turned her back to the house, feeling Rippner's eyes on her even through the mosquito net, and let the relieved tears wash her face. Hearing her father's voice stirred her tranquility, turned everything upside down, but she guessed in a good way.

When Lisa could calm down enough to face Rippner, face anyone without the chance that her heart would spill out of her chest through a single word, a single smile, she entered the house. Rippner was leaning casually against the wall and watched her with hands in his pockets. In the dim light of the bulb above them, the deep shadows shifted on his face as he tilted his head, giving his eyes an eerie glint.

"How is he?"

Lisa was surprised to detect honest curiosity in his voice as she handed back his phone. "I guess fine. Worried but fine."

"Good." The silence was heavy between them as he studied her. "You didn't say anything you shouldn't have, right?"

"No. I was just trying to convince him I was all right." Her smile was wavering around the corners: it was more of an inside joke; Rippner, too, knew it well what a superhuman effort the task required. Her father was anything but convincible when it came to her well-being.

"Okay," he nodded simply, pocketing the mobile.

Suddenly she realized how much of an act it was from his side: trusting her like this, bothering with her emotional needs. Gratitude flooded her in hot waves, and she wanted him to know how much it meant to her, how it was the best birthday gift she'd gotten in the last five years. But when she spoke, words failed her.

"I… Jackson… thanks."

And still, from the smile on his face she knew he understood even the words she couldn't form. He almost always did, and this was the first time she found it a blessing.

In her humble speechlessness, with the shimmering glow in her eyes, with the words she couldn't tell, the smile she couldn't give but was stored in her all labeled for him, Lisa looked beautiful to him. He knew that with this basically and technically small effort from his side, something had just changed between them; and he intended to keep the moment with its crystal-clarity in a sanctuary deep within him forever.

As Rippner paced back to the living room, secretly checking the last call on his phone (he wasn't going to trust her blindly but was glad to see the last number was indeed Joe Reisert's and lasted exactly one minute and twenty-eight seconds), he gave himself a mental thumbs-up that Lisa didn't even see the irony in the situation- and it was his doing again- that she shouldn't be so grateful for something that had been forcefully taken from her then granted again. He knew perfectly how the human mind worked.

He also didn't fail to notice that for the first time in many months, hell, maybe the first time in their whole history, she called him on his first name. Not the shortened version, not tauntingly. The simple act itself drew a contented smile on his lips. It was an achievement he'd never suspected would feel so good.

: :

"You gotta be kidding me," Rippner leant against the doorframe to the kitchen, smirking sleepily. Lisa, a bit timidly, smiled back. "It's 3 am?"

"3.22, to be precise. Sorry, I didn't want to wake you."

He shook his head with a hint of disapproval, and crossed his arms before his chest. He'd awoken to the sound of cutlery clinking and a glowing yellow rectangle cast on the living room floor. The light in the kitchen was on, and as he'd shuffled closer, he caught a glimpse of Lisa preparing what suspiciously looked like scrambled eggs. She came across like she'd been battling for sleep and had obviously lost it.

"You okay?"

Lisa gazed at him, halting with the knife above the slices of red onion. It was clear what he meant by his words but this time it wasn't a nightmare keeping her awake. Actually, after the phone call with her father, she found it hard to fall asleep at all.

"Sure, just… um… bad habit, I guess."

"Uh-huh."

Cracking an egg, she poured its content in a small bowl and peered at him. "You want some?"

"Nah. I might make a cup of tea, though."

He pushed himself away from the doorframe and strolled to the counter. Lisa noticed he was barefoot, and there was a lock above his left ear that stood in a very strange angle, indicating he'd just climbed out of bed. Uncombed, his hair turned into untidy curls at the back of his neck, playfully brushing his ears. His appearance tickled something in her stomach, and she had to bow her head to hide an amused little smile creeping on her face.

"Want tea?"

"Yeah, thanks. Rosehip, please, there's a box in there."

She cracked another egg, added salt and sour cream, and stirred it with expert, quick movements as he sluggishly prepared two mugs and groped for the kettle. It was awkward, his presence now in the ritual she always held alone, and right now she wasn't ready for this. There were too many things unsettled between them, and Lisa found no inclination in her to immerse in them at the moment.

"I'll try to be quiet, you can go back to sleep," she promised, silently hoping that he would accept it but Rippner shrugged, opening up the cupboards one by one, trying to locate the teabags.

"No, I'm fine. You know I can go with little sleep."

Actually, he didn't quite look like that for her right now as he accidentally dropped the box of teabags then burnt his hand with the kettle. A bit annoyed, Lisa placed her hand on his wrist and pushed him gently away to prepare the tea while the onion was sizzling in the pan. He stayed standing behind her left shoulder, just a few inches away; Lisa could feel the heat emitting from his body. A point somewhere below her left ear was burning by the imagined or real gaze she assumed he was giving her. Lisa turned her head and looked up at him, trying to sound more caring than irritated, phrasing a hint in a way that it wouldn't come off as a hint.

"You look tired, why don't you go back?"

Through the heavy curtain of sleepiness, he watched her closely, suddenly seeing it clearly. All right, so she was eager to be left alone.

He huffed gruffly. "Fine."

Casting a contemptuous glare in her direction, he left the kitchen without a word. As he plopped down on the couch keen on going back to sleep, he realized he was too tense to be able to relax. What the _fuck_ was his problem after all? He rubbed his forehead with a frustrated groan. For some reason, the fact that she wanted to shut herself away from him hurt. Unreasonable or not. He'd seen her during these lonely late night dinners many times, completely fazed by the intriguing fact that this woman he could not unravel was sporting some grave issues he couldn't put his finger on. It seemed Lisa didn't have the inclination to change this pastime from lonely into social. Not with him, anyway. She could go and sulk as much she wished, for all he cared.

Giving the finishing touches to the scrambled eggs, Lisa sighed, feeling completely miserable. Actually, feeling like a total bitch. Recently she discovered he had this talent to make her feel so when she occasionally lashed out against him. She needed some time alone but with him around it was simply impossible. Somehow he always sensed it just perfectly when and how he could rattle her even more, whether it was his intention or not. Tiptoeing to the kitchen door, she peeked across the hallway and into the living room. The TV was on. In the flickering bluish light Rippner was sitting with his back to her, obviously not paying attention to the infomercials as he reclined forward with his elbows rested on his knees. For some reason, Lisa had the inkling that she offended him somehow.

Suppressing a groan, she went back to the kitchen. Took her plate, the two mugs, switched off the light and walked over to him.

"May I sit here?" she asked quietly. Rippner looked up, a shadow of surprise crossing his face but it disappeared before it could fully develop. He motioned to the couch, making space for her.

"Thanks." He took his mug from her overloaded hands.

Lisa settled in, pulled her legs under her and placed the plate on her thigh. The silence was awkward. Both of them left their eyes on the uninteresting images of the best vacuum cleaner man ever created, looking somewhere beyond the muted TV. Clearing her throat, Lisa lifted her plate.

"Want some? This is your last chance to taste my Michelin star scrambled eggs."

He laughed, and with it, eased the tension between them. "Okay. I'm absolutely honored now."

Sticking a piece on the fork, she held it out for him. He swiftly ate it off of it.

And the world came to a sudden halt.

They seemed to sober at the very same moment: the fork trembled and he stopped chewing.

_Jesus, what am I doing? _Lisa looked at her plate and swallowed. It was an innocent move but felt anything but. _How am I supposed to finish the rest with this fork?_ She hid the shiver shaking her limbs by tossing the eggs from side to side, watching dully as the super intelligent vacuum cleaner sucked up a fistful of paper-clips.

She couldn't see his smile, only sensed it through his words. "It tastes good."

"Yeah, after all, I had a few years to bring it to perfection," she meant it as a joke but came out quite bitterly.

Rippner didn't comment on it, simply studied her with a closed expression. From a point of view she was an indefatigable fighter, strong, and above all, stubborn; always going through whatever she had in mind. On the other hand, her incapability to accept facts for what they were, turn them to her profit and move on made her incredibly weak. The never-ending emotional circles she was running in had a destructive impact on her life that she was blind to see. He had no idea what kept her awake tonight but whatever it was, she let it take her down the usual road, the spiral course downward; she made it a habit to mope about just because it was a safe and familiar territory. Sometimes he suspected she simply _didn't_ want to let things go. If nothing else, they were a good excuse _not_ to meet expectation that required some effort from her part. How could someone so bold in defying the threat he'd imposed on the plane be so annoyingly, unreasonably coward?

He waited till she finished eating; that much, he was considerate. Considerate and cautious: he let her place the plate on the coffee table – the last thing he needed was a pissed Lisa with a damn fork.

"Why didn't you file a report on how you got that scar?"

She glared at him incredulously. There was a dangerous flicker in her eyes that didn't escape his attention but ignored it. He was ready for whatever fight she was going to put up; he'd been waited too long with his questions.

"Well, it's my birthday, so I can have a wish. And I wish not to talk about this."

"Technically, no, your birthday was yesterday."

"You're unbelievable." Her mouth turned into a rigid line. His, on the other hand, was smug as ever.

"Yeah, I know. Come on, talk to me."

Lisa moved to stand but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back on the couch. She was surprisingly yielding compared to the murderous look she had on her face. Rippner kept her firmly by his side, their hips brushing against each other. With his free hand he reached out. His fingers skimmed across her cheek, grazed the corner of her lips.

"You should know by now you can't escape me."

"Oh, God, you're so unbearably arrogant," she muttered, feeling a bit disorientated by his feather-like, almost nonexistent touch that was so much in contrast with his self-confident tone.

His eyes were sparkling with playful mischief. "Isn't that what women find so irresistible about me?"

"Hell, no!"

With an arrogant grin, an almost erotic bite on his lower lip that made her cheeks flush and gave Lisa the strange notion that her body heat would be able to melt the whole North Pole at the moment, damn it, maybe even the Antarctica, he remarked flippantly, "Well, we all know a woman's no, in fact, means yes…"

Lisa glowered at him incredulously, fighting the urge to simply crack his nose. "I could claw your pretty eyes out right now, you know?"

"You just said pretty?"

"No…! Yes…! I mean, that was meant to be sarcasm."

"Sure."

The dashing lopsided smile crossing his face made her guards slump along with her body, and sighing frustrated, she stayed in place. Though he gave her the urge to scream, he also planted a tickling sensation in her stomach that wanted to burst out in the form of a laugh. He always knew flawlessly how to take away the edge of whatever blood-boiling remark he'd just dropped; of course, only if doing so served him.

"Though I love when you praise me, let's go back to the topic and tell me now why you didn't report it."

Lisa squared her jaws defiantly, and the expert he was in reading her, he jabbed a threatening finger at her before she could even open her mouth.

"I know you haven't. You have only one police record for speeding from three years ago, and nothing else. I checked everything."

Lisa scrunched her face sourly. Of course, he did. She could easily tell it annoyed him to no end that there was no record of it, no trace that he'd been able to happen upon. He put it down as an offence to his extraordinary Sherlock side and behaved like she kept it a secret from _him_ just to miff him.

Lisa turned away and gazed out the window. How could she tell him, how would he understand that she'd been ashamed, felt filthy, and blamed herself for not being fierce enough, fierce at all, maybe being too attractive and insolent thus challenging the man, calling fate out against her? How would he understand that she couldn't find the strength in her to share something so private and in a way intimate with uncaring, strange policemen, didn't want them to look at her with disgust or pity? She'd deemed the odds of them catching that man very slim anyway. And above all, didn't want to give a description because doing so, she would have relived every single moment she fought to erase from her mind. So she chose not to talk about it to anyone except her parents, wishing that with it, with the unshared words, the deed, too, would be undone.

She closed her eyes tightly. Why was it that to real, overwhelming pain we weren't able to match words?

Suddenly disgust flooded her in ripples at the memory, making her stomach convulse, throat clench and for a minute it felt like the feeling would stuck halfway, strangling her. She remembered the smell, the pain, the utter physical and emotional demolition but the worst came afterwards. Getting in her car, driving home, going in the bathroom, discarding her clothes. Cleaning herself. Scrubbing at her skin, wiping off the grime between her legs, washing, washing the soft flesh and still, always feeling mucky, even days, weeks later she would be jolted awake at night with the irresistible urge to rub off the disgusting goo oozing from her. Those nights she would throw up right beside the bed then lay there in shame, wide awake.

She wished she hadn't eaten anything because the scrambled eggs felt overly uncomfortable in her stomach right now. Her hand found its way to the scar, gripped the t-shirt with whitening knuckles above it. _This is a reminder so you'd know where your place is_, and that was when the fighter gave up and died, and motionless, she let him shred her.

The fighter sprang to life later with the involuntary assistance of the very man sitting next to her, and for that she was, all in all, paradoxically, forever grateful to him.

"Lisa?"

His voice startled her. She almost forgot it wasn't one of those nights spent on her couch, wallowing in misery alone. Instead answering his question, she absently whispered, staring at the bluish light of the streetlamps, the ghostly glow they painted on the windowpane.

"Sometimes I think of the woman I never became. The life I never had but was in store if…"

He groaned in utter disbelief. "I don't get why you're tormenting yourself with pointless things like this."

"You never do anything pointless?" She turned towards him, a mixture of mild surprise and sadness edging her voice as if doing unreasonable things would make him more humane. His gaze was nothing if not grave as he looked at her with heavy eyelids.

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't. You're the living proof."

"What do you mean?"

"Like following you home from the airport. Getting caught."

He didn't want to tell her how pointless it was to follow her for eight weeks when all he needed wasn't more than two. What really was crucial in terms of her personality wasn't revealed after eight weeks either, but so he fell into the deep, sticky hole of obsession, and that alone had obscured his clear judgment. He should have met her at the airport devoid of emotions, and instead, his head was full of their imagined connection, his fantasies, the little insignificant details of her life. And he certainly shouldn't have invited her for a drink. What the hell was he thinking? That wasn't a mere challenge. He wanted to take a closer look at what he'd never have. Or rather, challenge the odds and see if he really would never have it. Frankly, did he have the right to criticize her for her own useless reflections?

"So you never start a question with what-if?"

"Isn't that pointless?"

He didn't say a definite no, because that would have been a lie. Every what-if he'd ever mused on had something to do with her but it didn't change the fact that it was useless.

"Maybe. I guess I just want to see what I lost. You know, to compare the mental image I had of my future self in the past and what I'm having now. I surely didn't imagine my life at twenty-seven this way. You never-?" She stopped in mid-sentence, stole a glance at him. "Of course… hopefully as a kid you never pictured yourself as a terrorist."

This time he took no notice of the job description. "I knew what I _didn't_ want to be: a 9-to-5 boring chap like my father. And see, I didn't become one."

"Good for you."

The silence that permeated the room for a few minutes was, surprisingly, anything but uncomfortable. Lisa huddled under his blanket and sipped her tea lazily. Rippner sat beside her enveloped in his thoughts. His legs stretched before him leisurely as he rested his head on the foam-filled back of the couch.

"You know what disaffectation is?" he asked suddenly.

After reading tons of books dealing with psychoanalysis, Lisa was pretty familiar with the term. Slightly pissed, she stared at him hard.

"So you suggest I should simply eliminate every feeling in connection with that event? So what I wouldn't recognize anymore means it doesn't exist? Wow, tells a lot about your emotional intelligence. I guess you've practiced this method a lot. Actually, to a degree where you cannot reflect over anything at all." Looking at his contorted face, the black-blue shadows shifting menacingly on his features as the TV flickered, she snorted: "Oh scratch that. Anything but anger… That one you surely recognize."

Rippner laid his head back and sighed heavily, exhaling his momentary wrath. For some reason, he terribly wanted to prove her wrong right now, not really realizing the thing she'd just accused him with was something he'd worked very hard to achieve, and was famous- and perhaps envied- for among his co-workers. She could push his buttons with spot-on accuracy, eliciting completely controversial reactions from him, and it was disturbing. In his mind, and it was the legacy of the stalker who examined the subject with academic precision, only he had the right to do so.

"Thing is, you still let that asshole rape you every fucking day and numb you into this state of suspended animosity. That shithead was just some loser who realized he'd never have a woman like you, and it made him bitter and drove him-" he stopped abruptly, suddenly unable to decide if he was talking about the rapist or himself. The sensation jolted around in his chest like a brick, shattering his carefully built detachment.

He was all of a sudden sharply aware of her arm brushing his arm under the blanket, even their knees touched. She was so close. The back of his hand jerked. It jerked towards hers, touched it, the skin on her knuckles. So soft. So maddeningly soft. The fury he recently felt whenever he thought of what had happened to her, the unreasonable fury over that someone dared touch her resurfaced. He never for a minute understood why the idea of some disgusting thug forcing himself on her left him absolutely deranged with rage. True, it was one of the most despicable act man could commit but it wasn't good enough explanation on the tempest it evoked within him.

_Because you want to touch her, too, but can't, _he accused himself. _Because you are jealous of that thug_. _Because he took something from her that you never will._ The feeling, unreasonable or not, felt pretty much like that.

"Just let it go already." It could easily be a remark addressed to him just as much to her.

"Easier said than done."

"Sure, especially if you don't even try."

Lisa shot him a glare. He had no idea whatsoever what huge step she'd made, what a wreck she'd been. That had been a long road, an incredibly long road that she'd covered. Someone so emotionally inept like he was would never value the slow but steady development she conducted.

"You know what? Why don't we talk about something else? I sure as hell don't need your condescending remarks right now."

"I'm not being condescending, Lisa!" Rippner moved so quickly that she didn't have time even to start. He grabbed her by her shoulders, shook her with an almost frustrated vehemence that made her head wobble back and forth like of a rag doll. His gaze was so intense as if it had its own light source, and for once, his face betrayed how upset he was, though she couldn't quite grasp the reason for it. "Can't you see what you're doing to yourself? Can't you see it's not him fucking up your life but you?"

Lisa eyed him like she saw him for the first time, unable to attach the words to what she knew, what she thought of him. It was so unlike him; not the spot-on analysis, not the utterly cruel words without sugar-coating but the heat he channeled at the moment. He was right, she knew he was but then again, he made it sound like it was easy. She couldn't form a reply, stayed frozen in his grip, and watched numbly as, to blow the awkwardness and alien taste of the moment away, a mischievous yet somewhat forced smile pulled the corner of his lips upwards.

"Hasn't anyone told you it was unfair to other men that you lock yourself up?"

She couldn't give the reaction he was most probably anticipating, only looked at him sadly. "All the men I meet are hell-bent on ruining my life."

He'd hurt her the worst possible way. Hurt her in a place she could not reach to cure, and there was no medicine, no medical treatment to help her. She couldn't move on, couldn't date because it seemed she served as a magnet for insane and violent men. She'd risked a lot, come over her previous resistance that shut her away from the world after the parking lot incident when she decided to join him at the Tex-Mex, thinking it was about time to give a chance to someone showing interest in her. And where it led her… She couldn't trust a man again, not yet.

"Point taken," Rippner released her like she burnt him, suddenly appearing very sober. "But just for the record, I wasn't hell-bent. Not in the beginning, at least."

"Yeah, like participating in someone's death would have left me emotionally unaffected."

The fury was immense, spreading over his features like a dark, muddy tide. She shook at the ferocity of his voice.

"You know what? You were right. Let's just change the fucking topic because you're honestly convinced that life is out there for you, and I'm the Antichrist who wanted nothing but harm you from day one. If that's what makes you feel better, then I won't disturb you in your wallowing."

"No, I…" Lisa bent forward, buried her face in her palms, and sighed desperately. Her voice was small and muffled as she mumbled to him. "Don't quarrel with me. Please, I just don't want to argue with you now."

She heard him exhale loudly, once, twice. She smiled a little behind her hand, there she dared to, as to how he seemed to always struggle for control over his temper when he was with her. She briefly wondered if it was a characteristic of him or a privilege only she could claim. A small, irrational and vain part of her whispered about the latter in her ear. She was still hiding her face from him when Rippner reached out for her and pulled her to him. It was a surprise for both of them that she let him. He touched her temple with his chin, lips too, maybe.

"Okay. Me neither."

Feeling his arm around her shoulder, being in each other's personal space, her whole body tensed. She kept fidgeting with a whole dimension of half-assed excuses to retreat (from being overly grateful for the sports bra she would always wear underneath the Batman shirt to minding the wound on her arm) crossing her mind but he didn't relinquish the loose hug and Lisa let her arms drop to her lap, let her head rest against his shoulder. It's not that she trusted him, not in every way at least but right now his embrace was just as good enough as any other people's.

"Listen. I know it's cliché, you won't hear anything like this again from me, but that's the best I can offer: you should be grateful that you survived and got a second chance to value life for what it is. Just accept that it happened, that yes, it was unfair, yes, it changed your life. But it doesn't mean it ruined it forever. Realize it already that it also made you stronger."

"Stronger? No, it didn't. You did."

He pulled his head slightly back so he could see her face. There was a smile playing on his lips but so vague that she started to suspect her imagination tricked her.

"As much as my humble ego would like to claim it his own, it's fair to state you had it in you. Ever since then. You said it, remember? That it wouldn't happen again. You made sure of that by stabbing me."

Lisa looked up at him cautiously but instead of anger all she saw was the ghost of that smile. Her gaze dropped from his face to the scar at the base of his throat, and her fingers reached out to touch it before she could stop herself. He recoiled a bit, more out of the unexpected sensation than of resentment, and allowed her to feel the uneven tissue with her tentative, bizarrely curious fingers. He could easily understand it, her morbid admiration for the work she'd done, for the eerie little smile on her face, but the sensation of her touch was pretty much unwanted at the moment. Or rather, not the touch itself but what it evoked.

Her eyes swam back to his face as Lisa let her hand slide away from his neck, pretending it was all natural to touch him like that. She was thankful for the relative darkness, the flickering TV being the only source of light in the room beside the eerie glow filtering in from outside. He stared rigidly ahead, seemingly immersed in an ad of some weight loss protein powder. He couldn't be possibly interested in it, but she bit back the remark dancing on her tongue. Nothing, not even his expression, his ever so controlled face, his eyes, the muscles in his body: none of them gave him away. What eventually betrayed him was ironically his heart. She felt it beat away a thunderous rhythm under her palm, the only thing he couldn't control, and though it wasn't clear for her why he was upset, she smiled. She liked it, the drumming, the rebellious speed, the defying dance of valves because it said he had a heart, not only in physical way.

Somewhat shyly that she intruded his secret against his will- though he'd done the same to her over eight weeks and even more-, Lisa let her hand creep away.

They were fixating the obese woman miraculously becoming slim with unfocused eyes for a very long time. Lisa was growing sleepy, and she could tell by his even, deep breathing that he was about to drift away too. Still, she wasn't able to will her body to stand and move back to her room. Her limbs felt heavy, so did her head.

"It's nice," he muttered suddenly, brushing the top of her head with his nose. Perhaps he was referring to her hair. Or the once-obese woman, Lisa wondered sleepily. Of course, he didn't say: _your scent_, no, it'd have been too open praise, too personal and honest. Lisa looked up at him, not the remark but the tone of his voice made her do it, and smiled. It was only he who could tell something like this with a chocolate soft voice and such a detached, closed face. She didn't mind it though, she told herself she knew him that much already. She stirred. The tip of her nose brushed against his neck, his unruly curls tickling it, and- she was bolder- she admitted.

"I like your aftershave."

They went stock-still, both of them freezing for different reasons.

"It slipped, right?" he smirked.

"No, but it was a compliment to the brand, not you."

He chuckled. "Always thinking quick. Something I value the most in a woman."

They were equal now. That was a slip, too. They were too tired to think straight, that was the most obvious, most comfortable explanation to come up with.

They regarded each other from the covers of wariness, lies and shields they'd built in years. Rippner knew he was balancing on the edge of an abyss he could not see the bottom of. There was no way he would let himself risk the control over his life he was about to gain back. She was poisoning his thoughts by her mere presence. He was making an idiot of himself.

Rippner swallowed forcibly, swallowing the enormous sensation of grief, and leant forward for his mug. He willed the already lukewarm tea to help him gulp, and just as he wanted, the moment dissipated. They stayed there, leaning against each other but without the promise of something more, something tender and intimate.

Eventually, it was Lisa who fell asleep, her forehead pressing against his neck for support. His mind knew the solution; it was his body that wouldn't obey. Instead waking her, instead untangling their arms and leaving her on the couch, instead many other reasonable things he could have chosen, Rippner stretched himself out on the couch, pulling her with him, and covered them with the blanket. He switched off the TV, and in the dim light he settled to watch her with strained eyes. His hands came to life and had their own will as they encircled her. Everything felt unreal like in a delirium where one couldn't decide what was real and what was the play of imagination.

He had no idea what time it was, how long he'd been lying there listening to her breathing. She moved on her back, wedging her body between his and the back of the couch.

He followed her move. Buried his face in her hair, and he let his imagination roam, let his mind remember the times when he'd been picturing them this way, out in his car, just for the sake of entertainment in his infinite boredom, that's what he'd told himself back then, and the incredulity of reality almost crushed something in his chest now because the real sensation was too powerful to endure. He lifted his torso up on an elbow and watched her sleep, cherishing the moment because never up to that point could he see her sleep so peacefully, so relaxed in his presence. He leant in, touching her hairline with the tip of his nose, trying to catch some of her calmness to quiet his own tempest.

She stirred in her sleep, mumbled something about her slippers left in the fridge, and he smiled against her earlobe. A sigh escaped but whether from his lips of hers, it was hard to tell. And the thief he was, he stole what the stalker had never been able to get: with a swift, stealthy move, with an ashamed move, he filched a kiss from her lips, a dream-tasting soft goodnight kiss that lurched the world around him for a second, lurched the couch beneath them, and lurched something deep within his guts, tipping his ever shrinking coolness.

But it wasn't good enough in its passivity. It wasn't good enough without Lisa taking her own share of it from him.

So defeated in his own agenda, he gently kissed her eyebrow, and for his humble touch he got his reward when Lisa turned again in his arms and buried her face in the folds of his t-shirt – this involuntary, unconscious display of trust unexpectedly made his rebellious heart flutter against his ribs.

And for the first time in many, many years now, he fell into a deep, undisturbed sleep.

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**A/N:** I_ have two illustrations to this chapter if you're interested. Can be found under the link in my profile: the pics are called "Dinner" and "Heart"._


	12. Anomalous tendencies

_I'm happy you seemed to like the previous chapter. Hopefully this one won't be different._  
_Thank you for taking your time and review my story. It really means a lot._

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**Chapter 12: Anomalous tendencies**

Consciousness pulled her gradually out of the warm blanket of deep slumber. While her mind was rebooting itself, the body it was supposed to control was enjoying the last moments of relaxation. Lisa kept her eyes shut. Without seeing, she was aware of her surroundings, of the body snuggled up to her. _Under_ her. For a moment she pretended it was her father and she was still a little girl, having fallen asleep to his rhythmic, calm breathing on the back porch of their house. The pulsating drumming of the heart under her palm was just as soothing as was the hand entwined in her hair – it all could have been her father's. But the scent filling her nostrils was definitely not his. Lisa stirred, briefly wondering why his proximity didn't faze her, how a few weeks of forced inhabitation with him pushed further her boundaries, stretched out the threshold of her physical and psychic tolerance. There was something absolutely unlikely, crazy and maybe, yes, sick too, in the whole scenario: falling asleep beside him, sleeping through the night and waking with her head on his shoulder. Her hand over his heart. This man, this man had done- She forbade her mind to finish the mental reminder. No, not now, later maybe. Later she could reproach herself, remember all the things that had happened between them; remember all the deeds he'd done with those hands, irreparable, irredeemable things. Inside, she was reconciled with the world now. With him, too.

She curled her fingers into the fabric of his clothes, and the fingers in her hair curled the same way around her locks. It was their personal, queer conversation, their good morning-good morning. His hand slid down on her back, lightly tapping her, fingers playing a tune on her ribs and vertebrae that only he could hear, only he was able to coax music out of the bone-piano, and she smiled with secret wistfulness- though it wasn't quite clear what she was wishing for- against the Y on his grey university t-shirt.

: :

The day was the inverse of the previous one. As much they had avoided each other then as were they searching for the other's company now. The change passed off naturally. After breakfast Lisa simply didn't disappear upstairs while Rippner moved around the house with the air that suggested he was counting on her presence. They subconsciously prolonged what had started at night, the serene comfort they'd found in the proximity. They were both engaged in separate activities, not interfering with, sometimes not even talking to the other but at least physically they chose to stay close.

There was something vision-like in the whole scenario for Rippner – like an apparition, unreal. He pressed his forehead to the glass of the window, peeked through the thin lace patterns of the curtain at the calm suburban street, the neatly cut bushes, the old woman walking her dog across the street, the plastic toys scattered around the front lawns, while he deeply inhaled the humid flowery scent of detergent Lisa was using on their clothes permeating the house. Listened to the clinking of cutlery as she was bustling around in the kitchen, to her soft voice as she was humming along with the radio. He closed his eyes and smiled. He pined for saving this particular moment, completely deprived of its context, of the dimension of time, its past-present-future, of the circumstances, and mainly of its state of pretense – just the moment itself in its purity, clarity. A longing was unfolding in his chest, so strong that it left a physical ache behind. He was still standing there when Lisa came in to tidy the living room up, and the ache spread like a disastrous epidemic of a tropical disease. He was watching her through the newfound haze of yearning he couldn't name, and she rewarded his gaze with the same smile she would wear these days and he could not get enough of.

The chirp of Rippner's phone was a metaphor for everything they had forcefully forgotten. The soft ringing not only came as a hammering that shattered the peaceful silence but dragged the reality in the secluded island of the room.

"I have to answer this." He seemed almost apologetic as grabbed the phone and started out of the room.

Lisa stared after him with raised eyebrows, and listened as he accepted the call with a measured 'yeah'. Always the cautious not to reveal too much, not even the identity of the caller. Or himself, for that matter.

Rippner let the mosquito screen close with a snap behind him. From the cover of the porch roof, he squinted at the sky. Heavy wind rode across the garden, ruffling his hair, flapping the legs of his pants around his calves.

"We just found the perfect dummy. A redundant one," said Henry in the phone.

Rippner nodded to himself grimly. "Perfect. Send me the samples as soon as you have them. I managed to restore the access to their database."

"Will do that. Any news from Keefe?"

"Nope. Can't happen before the twenty-eighth."

"Good. That gives us hell of a lot of time."

"Tell me about it," he muttered, rubbing his eyes and blinking as something got in it in the windblast. He leant heavily against one of the wooden pillars, a silent sigh forming in his throat.

"Are you able to manage her for this long?"

His temper perked. "Henry, we've already talked about this. She's my concern, and mine only. I told you I needed her."

The silence was long on the other end of the line. Rippner could see the frown on Henry's forehead as the older man snorted with an equally amused and concerned tone. "Huh, if you say so. Where will be your last stop?"

"Don't know yet. Baltimore maybe."

"Fine. Gonna send you the details if we find a place for the dummy."

"Thanks," Rippner mumbled, and kept the phone pressed to his ear even after Henry had ended the call. His hand dropped with a tired jerk, and he slipped the phone in his pocket. Somehow it felt like riding a blind horse toward an abyss. He had the illusion of being in control, and probably he really was but something in him was continuously writhing in misery.

He went back inside. The previous day when Lisa wasn't around, Duke had offered him a cigarette he'd refused; now was the time to accept the offer if belatedly. He found the pack on the fridge, and pulled one out. Walked silently back outside with the cigarette balancing between his lips, and stood in the middle of the garden, exposed to the wind. Opened the match box, and frowned. Lisa would hate him for this.

He shook his head; why exactly would it bother him?

The first match burnt out in the wind before he could light the cigarette. He inhaled the phosphorous smell; Lisa loved that scent, he remembered. The second match almost broke in half from the ferocity he struck it with. _Loved that scent… Jesus_. Something was terribly not right with his head. He turned his back against the wind and took an irritated drag. Blew the smoke out with a huff as if with that, he could blow his thoughts too. It scraped his throat, stung his nose. Newport, menthol, not his favorite, but he wasn't in any state or mood to complain.

Pinching his nose, he glared in the distance. _What the heck is your problem?_

In fact, he knew the answer. The problem was sitting in the living room right now but he couldn't be more specific about the nature of the problem for the life of him. Not beyond the utter annoyance it evoked when he caught himself doubting his own acts, always doubting because of her. He simply couldn't recognize the continuous nagging feeling in his stomach.

"Are you okay?"

He almost jumped at the sudden voice behind him. His head snapped toward Lisa. She was standing a mere half foot away from him, her fingers brushing the fabric of his shirt. How the hell couldn't he hear her coming? He was really losing it.

"You startled me," he smiled. It was forced- in the turbulence of his emotions it couldn't be anything else-, and he reprimanded himself for it.

"Didn't mean to."

Lisa tilted her head to the side; a movement she'd undoubtedly picked up from him lately. She'd heard him enter the house, caught a glimpse of him disappear in the kitchen, and waited for him to return to the living room. He was away for so long that her curiosity perked up. She knew something wasn't right the moment she saw him standing outside in the wind, reading in his stance, the fine tone of muscles of his back under the shirt. She could read in his body language as art historians would in a Rodin statue. The Thinker – that was him now.

"You're upset."

Rippner laughed, disbelief lacing his voice. He was hundred percent sure his face was guarded, absolutely, flawlessly so, and still, she could sense whatever troubled him at the moment. How the hell could she read in him? It both amazed and annoyed him.

Noticing the concern in her look, he added soothingly. "Don't worry. Everything's going as planned."

Her hand didn't drop, still touched his elbow. Lisa stared in his eyes, followed the dark locks as the wind caught them. There was something warm in his voice, something deep and grave, too – if it weren't him, she'd have sworn it was something akin to sadness. Regret, maybe. Faintly, somewhere in the back of her mind she realized he didn't give a reassuring yes to her question. Maybe he wasn't lying but keeping the truth hidden was equal to that; and Lisa had to realize she just as much hated him giving an evasive reply as he hated her lying.

Her gaze fell on the half-smoked cigarette, and with a quirk of an eyebrow she let him know her doubt. Rippner smiled, absently reached out and tugged a lock behind her ear, brushing her earlobe softly, running down on her neck.

"Bad habit, nothing more."

Lisa almost leant into his touch but caught herself in the last second. Still, his fingers twitched as if realizing her intention. She watched him turn away slightly, taking a long drag and another before stubbing out the cigarette with his shoe. The fact that he wasn't confiding in her was disheartening. Then again, she wasn't any different.

: :

The evening brought unexpected fun when Duke, who'd come home earlier due to the bad weather conditions, had the weirdest suggestion.

"I have a deck of cards. Feel like playing poker?"

"No way." Lisa's eyes immediately flew to Rippner who returned her gaze with an ever so innocent blink. "Poker of all things? With him?"

She couldn't help but emit an amused laughter. Duke was definitely tempting fate and didn't see it coming. She agreed to play just for the heck of it. The two men had to explain her all the rules because she'd never had the ability to remember the different card games, and Rippner taunted her with a pout that she was making his job far too easy. Oh, all right, maybe she agreed to play out of pure challenge.

The first game was surprisingly Duke's, the next two, not so surprisingly, Rippner's. He was a horrible opponent, just as Lisa had anticipated but not quite the way she'd expected. He had a little smug smile in the corner of his lips that wouldn't drop for a minute, and she could swear he was able to play with the glint of his eyes. To her surprise, he wasn't wearing the poker face he usually did but- ironically, as opposed to his normal behavior- when he could have gone all blank faced, he used a whole range of expressions from fake-worried to outright cocky that had Lisa all the more confused. Many times, if nothing else it made her laugh when she realized he was pulling her leg. He was undoubtedly entertaining merely by looking at him.

With the non-committal clear-sight of an outsider- or rather, and even more so, with the understandable and justified worry of someone concerned-, Duke was watching them silently and also a bit puzzled. He recalled how Lisa's mother had called him not more than two days after the funeral, on the verge of tears and voice trembling with anger and terror. He remembered how she'd mumbled that after Henrietta's death she'd almost lost her whole family because of a madman. Duke didn't know much more of that madman that he'd chased Lisa through Joe's house, trying to kill her; not that it wasn't enough. He knew it, and still. Sometimes it was hard to believe this young man playing poker and taunting each other with Lisa was the same madman he was told about. It was even more difficult when Lisa's behavior around him was just as much intriguing. Actually, it also made him relaxed; he couldn't say he liked the idea of Lisa staying in the company of a criminal whatever she'd stated previously about that set-up, but that she didn't seem to be forced or in danger in any way eased his tension in that aspect. On the other hand, Lisa's natural ease around the man was giving another kind of worry, and Duke had to consider if it was a normal behavior from her part.

"Fold," he announced with a smile, and discarded the cards in the middle of the table. Lisa gave him a funny pout and raised – which meant nothing but pushing another sunflower-seed in the pot. There was a lot at stake: the loser had to do the dishes.

Rippner leant over the table, his eyes boring into hers, catching the goading glint. Not missing the haphazardly hidden sly smirk on her lips either. She was overly satisfied with herself while trying hard not to appeal so; that he could tell. He looked at the pot, at his cards. At the dishes, too.

"Oh, all right," he threw his cards over Duke's.

Lisa, smirking, spread hers face up. Both men drew closer.

"Shit," Rippner muttered. "One pair? One freaking pair? You had nothing. Absolutely nothing."

"I know."

He tossed up his head with an incredulous gape. "You completely fooled me."

"I know." Lisa had the brightest smug smile he'd ever seen on her face. "I guess it appoints you to take care of the dishes."

"Huh, no. Let me remind you the previous two games were mine."

"Does it leave me to be the kitchen maid now?" Duke stood with a chuckle. Lisa immediately jumped to her feet.

"No, absolutely not. I'll do it, really."

Her authoritative tone settled it. Duke wished them good night and went upstairs while Lisa collected their glasses and plates. Rippner followed her moves with haughty supervision from beside the counter. He even folded his arms in a bossy way that made her roll her eyes.

"I can do it, you know," he offered with a smirk when she dropped a fork. "Before you'd accuse me again for being a chauvinist."

"But you are." Lisa chuckled, and with a palm placed on his abdomen and the other on his arm, she pushed him away from the sink.

She couldn't see the expression on his face, the way his back went rigid. She also hadn't realized the new tendency she'd developed and that left him increasingly uncomfortable: the wide palette of subconscious touches.

: :

Something was not right.

Lisa sat up in the bed and glared in the dark with wide open eyes. She watched as the shadows that the trees at the back of the house cast on the window danced around on the wall, waltzed across the ceiling. She strained her ears, trying to listen to voices she couldn't hear. Only the wind was whistling through the bare branches outside, shaking the clay tiles of the roof. Somehow everything seemed terribly off.

Then it hit her. Ridiculously, it was the silence inside that bothered her. Paradoxically, it felt like blaring noise now, and it set her on edge. There was no way she could fall asleep by counting sheep and waiting for the Sandman when her senses were so sharp.

Precious minutes crawled along in misery.

"You're mental," she chided herself as she eventually climbed out of the bed. The house was silent as she tiptoed down the stairs. Halted on the bottom step, stood still, listening carefully. She could hear the calm, rhythmical breathing, and Lisa found herself counting, one, two, three. The tension left her body like someone had just pulled out a plug in her. Why it worked better than counting those damn sheep?

"What, scrambled eggs again?" sounded harshly in the silence.

Her heart almost stopped at his sudden voice, and stuttered quickly. "No, sorry. Just sleep."

Feeling utterly stupid, Lisa turned hurriedly and climbed back on the steps. Rippner groaned and sat up. What the hell was wrong with her?

"Leese," he whispered into the darkness but she was already upstairs. He caught up with her at the door to her room. "What? You had a nightmare?"

Even in the almost pitch black darkness of the hallway Lisa couldn't make herself to look his way. He had to be very close, she could tell it by the way the air seemed to quiver from the heat his body emitted.

"I just couldn't sleep and thought… I mean…" Lisa sighed pathetically. She felt horrible. Next time possible, she would go to a damn doctor and have a prescription for sleeping pills. "Um, isn't it too uncomfortable on the couch?"

It came in handy, the darkness, because he gaped. Unceremoniously left his mouth open. A laugh started to bubble in his chest. It just simply couldn't be: was Lisa Reisert inviting him into her bed? She had to be having serious issues. _That makes two of us_, he thought with ruthless self-irony. When he talked, though, his voice was flawlessly neutral. "So you say you want me to come up here?"

"No, if you want… I mean, yes. Don't get me wrong please," she mumbled miserably. He could hear the rustling of clothes, and guessed she was covering her face as though he could see her embarrassment. He only wished he could. "I just thought if I heard someone's breathing, it'd soothe me."

Rippner strained his eyes to make out her face in the dark. He figured it wasn't the right time to crack some insensitive joke so he just nodded.

"Okay."

They started on the far sides of the bed, both staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes.

Lisa felt herself smiling at the oddity of the moment, of everything. For some reason, he made her feel safe, and it was ridiculous considering their past. But these days everything seemed to be just that. It was an unlikely reality: being on the run from the police without committing crime, and on a primal level enjoying the freedom it provided her; sleeping in the same bed with someone falling into the flattering category of Big Bad Men, and strange enough, on some other primal level enjoying that, too. Being uprooted made her somehow feel elated, elevated. The post-flight frustration and impatience that had controlled her behavior towards the hotel guests, and then later the slow devastation of the voluntary imprisonment in her own flat, their memories had dissipated along the hundreds of miles of road, and she felt free. Ironically, Rippner appeared to go through the exact opposite: the vast open land with no real destination but hundred different routes seemed to close in on him, and he struggled like he was again a captive.

Turning towards him, Lisa curled into a fetal position. Within a few seconds she fell asleep.

It couldn't really be told about Rippner. Partly because Lisa had snuggled so close to him that half the bed stood empty, leaving quite a narrow space for him; partly because he was a man and it was incredible how unaware Lisa was of her own attractiveness or of how incriminating- tempting- the situation was. She was so fucking chaste, so fucking innocent. And naïve, too. He couldn't grasp how the hell she could trust him so much. If it weren't Lisa, if it were some other woman, any woman, he wouldn't act like a goddamn gentleman. But when he considered asking himself what exactly was different in Lisa that stopped him from going his usual way, he chose to banish even the question from his mind.

He knew he was losing it, falling apart around the edges. He could feel it pulling him down from day to day, lower and lower. She was like a vile poison oozing through his skin and weakening him. He knew that in this game he could only lose – all he was granted to decide was the front he wished to be defeated at. The front that would bring less damage.

Usually he wasn't someone who would deny himself what aroused his desire or interest. But with Lisa, he was wary. On a certain, very sensible level he was even afraid: any lapses out of the safely neutral territory they were staying now would cause another downfall. He'd seen what happened in the summer when he let himself indulge in the seemingly harmless activity of following her; raising it to another level, giving in his own desire could have incalculable consequences.

Of course, theoretically speaking; Lisa, though incomparably more relaxed in his company than ever before, was sure far from getting physical with him. Anyway, in the self-preservation process his needs had to fall victim to sensibility.

She was, all in all, a goddamn tease. And more so because she wasn't aware of it. If it weren't unconscious, his interest would have been disappeared right in the beginning; he found pretentious mannerism painfully obnoxious and cheap – not that it ever stopped him from taking the opportunity when met with easy women. Even while he'd been tailing her, it felt like she was deliberately teasing him with innocent things. He'd entertained himself with thinking so. There had been quite a few occasions. Like when getting out of her car with a skirt ridden above her knees, she left it so, left it for two seconds before pulling it back down; like when she laughed heartily at Cynthia's jokes; the honest softness on her face as her father hugged her. It was like with these slips she allowed him to catch a glimpse at the real Lisa she was hiding behind the boring, shallow mask. Like a game, a catch-me-if-you-can challenge; and sometimes all he wanted was to get out of his car, and- fuck Keefe, fuck the assignment- catch her.

And she was doing it again: the little smiles, little touches, the signals that landed right in his groins.

Lisa had no idea what a huge thing she'd just asked; how much of self-restraint it took him not to take her then and there. For fuck's sake, he was a man after all, and here she was, not wanting anything but cuddle like he was her father, or worse, a giant stuffed Teddy bear. A fucking eunuch. Did she really think he was some asexual freak who had no bodily wants?

The only explanation was that _she_ had no such needs, not in connection with him, anyway, that's why it didn't even occur to her that it could be otherwise with him. The possibility was somehow dispiriting.

: :

He felt like he hadn't slept a wink. With the numberless shifts- what shifts: _jolts_- into and out of sleep during the night, it wasn't surprising. It was still dark when he'd been jarred awake by a smack across his head, finding himself lying on his stomach with Lisa's head resting between his shoulder-blades. As it seemed, her elbow had accidentally connected with his head as she moved.

She was a horrible sleeper: she would kick off the blanket, and when she was cold, would try to find the warmest spot in the bed – which right now happened to be him. So in the faint light of the morning sun he woke up with a massive headache and a very uncomfortable feeling in his pants when he realized her hand had found its way to his lower back _under_ the damn t-shirt. In turn, it seemed his hand had found the exact same spot under _her_ clothes. She was beautiful with her nose pressed to his shoulder, all softness and silkiness and Lisa-scent – and the pounding in his head doubled in intensity. More carefully than he was feeling and actually intended at the moment, he untangled their limbs and left the room.

In the bathroom he stared in the mirror, meeting his own gaze- _haunted_ gaze, he had to discover- above the white foam-beard, and swore it was the last time he would let her sleep with him. The oath was sealed with blood when the razor slipped and he cut his jaw, and he cursed. What exactly was she doing that turned him into such a wreck? This whole damn deal with Keefe was seriously starting to get to him.

By the time he emerged from the bathroom, Lisa was already putting bread in the toaster. Her eyes fluttered to his face.

"Good morning."

Rippner went to pour a mug of coffee for himself. "Morning." He turned his back on her and peeked out the window. The sky looked horrible, it was all but twilit dimness outside and the streetlights were still on despite the late morning hour.

"Duke said it'd be one of the five days in the year when it's raining here."

He noticed Lisa tried to avoid eye contact with him without being obvious that she was trying to. He walked back to the counter, filled also her cup with coffee. The stealthy gaze she was giving him from the corner of her eyes tickled him.

"There's a cut…"

"I know, never mind," he said dismissively. "Quite embarrassing for someone so deft with a knife."

Her smile was wavering around the edges at the indifferent reminder and under his cool stare. With a plate in her hand, she stilled in the middle of a movement and narrowed her eyes at him.

"What happened… you cut your hair?"

Rippner looked at her questioningly, at the parted lips and impossibly huge eyes. Suddenly he wanted to take a mental snapshot of her at the moment.

"Yeah," he forced out. It had been an impromptu urge to make a change in his life. If everything were as easy as grabbing a scissor and cropping his hair, he could die a happy man. "Was getting too long."

"Oh," Lisa breathed, her eyebrows forming a funny slope-shaped curve as she pointed at her own neck, explanatorily. "The curls…" she mumbled.

"Excuse me?"

"Your curls… they're gone."

He couldn't believe she actually blushed a little. The rational side of him knew- warned him, even- he should take his eyes off her but they had a rebellious own will. He even lost the connection between his senses and the part of his brain that should have processed the information, and just stood there, feeling like a big oaf.

"Umm?"

"They were cute."

"Cute?" he exclaimed with a bit more force than intended, only belatedly realizing by the sly glint in her eyes that she was pulling his leg. "If I knew it was cute, I would've cut it much earlier."

Lisa only chuckled at him, at the vain and overly self-respectful macho side he was displaying. Her hand flew up, and she ran her fingers through the thick locks at the back of his head. Now his hair was about the length from the plane, though here and there the cut looked a bit makeshift.

"You could have asked me to help with it," she smiled.

Rippner only skirted out of the way of her touch and kept it to himself that the last thing he wanted… _needed_ was her fingers tangled in his hair. Her touches made him grow jumpy, irritated. Unbalanced. How the hell she couldn't see it affected him? How she didn't think she couldn't touch him without evoking something she surely didn't want to think of? After all, they weren't some kids long before sexual maturity.

"What's wrong?"

He moaned inwardly, pulling the toasts out of the toaster. She was getting nerve-racking with her newly developed insight. "Nothing."

"Jackson."

_There it goes again_, he felt her hand on his biceps, the tingle in his stomach prompted by her way of calling his name, the soft clap of consonants on her tongue. He shook her touch off by sidestepping her, and barked. "I said, nothing. You have problem with understanding the word?"

"No." Her voice was a low whisper as she blinked at him, taken aback by his attitude. He could so easily slip back in the overly arrogant and superior mode that his unpredictability always rattled her.

Rippner sat down at the table, picking up the Buffalo Bulletin he found there, not really realizing it was two days old. Not that it mattered since he caught himself reading the same article over and over again. In fact, he couldn't go past the headline. He sensed her moving around cautiously like she didn't want to make any noise that would piss him off even more. Hesitantly, she placed his coffee he'd left on the counter in front of him and sat, too. Rippner stole a glance at her and instantly regretted it. Regretted his previous words too. After all, it wasn't her fault that he couldn't control his damn hormones.

"I'm sorry."

Lisa looked up, noticing his faint smile and she responded with her own in kind. "It's okay. Sorry for pushing you. It was your business only."

"No, I was just being a general asshole."

She chuckled, quirking her eyebrows in a way that told him she wasn't about to protest. She spread butter on her toast. Rippner put down the newspaper and did the same.

"So what's the plan?"

"We're leaving tomorrow."

"Oh, already?"

Rippner shrugged. Maybe if he could again concentrate on something other than what she was doing around him, he would get his focus back. The past few days drained him more than the strained watchfulness he kept up on the road.

"We still have more than a week till the show." He looked at Lisa from the top of his eyes. She didn't catch his scrutiny, and he studied the line of her brows freely, the calm, lazy curves of her lips. "Or rather, _only_ nine days and you can finally get rid of me for good."

At that, she looked up, eyes huge, lips slightly agape, and there was no smile on her face, just a contemplating expression like she hadn't thought of it from that aspect. She blinked, and suddenly his heart couldn't interpret the expression spreading over her face in any other way but a bit somber. She tried to cover it with a shaky smile but it wasn't too successful. In that minute neither of them could imagine how that life would look like. No running around aimlessly. No running around aimlessly _together_.

His heart started to beat in an unhealthy pace as he contemplated something. It wasn't clear which part of him made him say it out loud because inwardly his whole being seemed to cringe at the idea. At her possible answer. At the complications it might arouse, both strategically, both, yes, he had to admit it, emotionally.

"Actually you can stay here. Now that they let me finish the job, you don't have to be there."

Lisa stared at him, the hurt even she wasn't aware of clear as daylight on her face. "You mean you don't need me anymore?"

"I mean there's no need for you to tag along. You can finally get your life back."

Her cup made a loud snap as she put it back on the table. Lisa cleared her throat, and frowned. It was abnormal, deep down she knew it; the feeling was. Abnormal because she shouldn't have been frightened by the prospect that he'd leave her behind.

"I don't think I can. What'd your associates think when my return spreads around the news?"

She had a point there, Rippner admitted inwardly with an air of utter contentment.

: :

He occupied both patio chairs on the porch, one for him, the other for various books he'd found on Duke's shelves; partly because he wasn't considerate at the moment, partly because he wanted to avoid the situation Lisa eventually created without- or despite- his assistance. As eagerly he strived for solitude as persistently she sought his company.

She hopped on the table, paying no mind to his obvious but feeble attempt to keep her away from him.

It was raining sleepily. Lisa leant against the wall and watched the water drops balancing along the eaves before disappearing in the little puddles on the gravel.

"I love rain. My father does, too. He used to sit in his rocking chair on the back porch and watch it for hours. When I was small I always joined him. I had my best sleep those times, snuggled up to him and listening to the dripping."

Rippner regarded her from the cover of a book, the dreamy eyes and relaxed posture as her legs were dangling playfully. It was a new habit, a welcomed habit that she would share these little memories and personal details with him; he was almost positive that she wasn't even aware of it. He couldn't help but congratulate to himself for making her slowly let him in her life. He smiled a secret smile at its ingenuity. _His_ ingenuity.

The sweet scent of orange reached his nose. She was peeling one, chewing at the sections one by one, absent-mindedly drinking in the juice. He watched her from behind the book, behind his hand and the crumbling wall of his cold resolution, watched the orange between her lips and thought of the table, thought how it had the right height, perfect height. Hip height. It looked massive enough to support their weight. The rocking, too. He thought her lips would taste orange now. Her fingers, too. He thought of him walk up to there and fuck her. Thought of her thighs around his waist.

He swallowed but it was too late. He couldn't swallow the arousal, couldn't call his blood back to north. _Oh, for crying out loud._ He seriously seemed to have some deep issues with his head.

Then she looked at him with that little smile that somehow always managed to make a landfall in his stomach, a bit sad, a bit hesitant but very much innocent and honest, he only labeled it as Lisa-smile, the _non-faked_ Lisa-smile, and suddenly his previous phrasing- to fuck her- seemed unfitting. Indecent, even.

"When it stops, do you think we can go for a walk?"

Without being aware that he did, he nodded in consent.

Yes, maybe he was brilliant enough to change her approach to him, the degree she was opening toward him while lowering her defenses; but she was undeniably doing something with him that resulted in the same.

: :

After days of staying inside the house, it felt incredibly good to stretch their limbs and move a bit. It was chilly, the air humid but fresh after the rainfall. The cold wind nipped their skin red.

Above her clothes, Lisa put on Rippner's grey sweatshirt with Duke's fingerless gloves that were a bit too large for her. As they walked down the street towards a nearby park, she hid her face from the wind behind the neck of the shirt, secretly inhaled Rippner's scent and smiled: with some luck, her clothes would keep it for a few more hours.

Rippner wore a turtleneck under a sports coat, and tucked his hands deep in the pockets of his dark jeans as he followed her down the path across the park. The gravel was scrunching beneath their feet. No one was around; judging by the color of the sky, they were most probably between two rainfalls. He was watching Lisa put a snail off the sidewalk, and noted to himself how perfectly she looked in his hoodie; it seemed just right that she chose to wear it.

There was a lake in the middle of the park, under half bald trees and bushes. They waded across the ankle-high blanket of yellow leaves and grass toward the water. Red shiny blurs of fishes were wriggling under the surface, sending ripples across the smooth reflection of the storm-clouds. Lisa hugged herself and bore her gaze into the water.

"You think the FBI will be able to protect you from the company?" she asked with a distant look. "I mean, they might take revenge for what you're doing now, right?"

Rippner sent a scowl her way that she failed to see. There was no way he'd go into this topic. He shrugged and remarked bluntly. "That's for me to worry about."

Lisa turned her head toward him, and narrowed her eyes, trying to gauge his mood. A ripple of unknown, unnamed anxiety shot boiled up in her, making her mood turn a shade gloomier. Maybe it was just the weather, she told herself.

"What will you do when it's over? What's your plan with your life?"

He stared at her all stone-faced. "Nothing."

"Come on. You must have some plans, things you would like to achieve."

"I don't fantasize about things. It's useless. And if possible I prefer to concentrate on one thing at a time and get over and done with that one, then move on to the next."

"All right, that's fine. Then let's not talk about the near future. How you see your life let's say in five years?"

His eyebrows wrinkled in a sardonic way as he looked up on her. "So typical of you, this question. Even more stupid than the other. I don't see it any way."

She glared at him somewhat superiorly, and he, again, recognized his own method in the patronizing nods of her head.

"As much as you'd like to think of yourself in other way, you still have dreams and goals just like other people, Jackson. If you don't want to tell me, fine, just say it's none of my business but don't act like you never think of it."

Rippner didn't say anything. He certainly didn't want to tell her he wasn't planning to live his entire life under the constant supervision of the FBI like the subject of some goddamn reality show. And he certainly wouldn't admit he did have fantasies, and recently a fine portion of them involved her in a way that'd give her enough opportunity to come up with new variations on scrambled eggs.

"All right. Answer your own question then. How you see your life in five years? Still watching late night movies alone?"

Lisa strolled a bit away, bent down to search for a pebble. "Very funny," she scowled at the stone, not him. Gazed over at the lake. Some people never change, she thought grimly.

"I didn't mean it as a joke."

"Okay, then just stop picking on me."

"I'm not- Agh." He felt like tearing his hair in annoyance. "Forget it."

She cocked her head to the side and regarded him curiously. Sometimes she couldn't decide if he was trying to help or bully her. The difference between the two when performed by him was so subtle that she had difficulty to catch it. Deciding to let it drop, she turned away.

"As a little girl when I thought of my adult life, I always imagined it with deadlines. By thirteen I'd have my first kiss. At age twenty, I'd be married, by twenty-five I'd have my first child. I never thought _how_ I'd achieve it, it almost seemed to my child mind that I'd simply have it by then, like a birthday present, abracadabra, appear in my life just like that. Right now it's the same. Within five years I'd like to… I mean, I plan…" she stammered, and stopped clumsily.

Rippner cocked an eyebrow, knowing exactly well what was coming but purely out of goading let Lisa struggle through the words and her inhibition. She rolled the stone between her fingers, and even though she was a few steps away from him and slightly turned away, he could tell she was blushing.

The pebble felt cold against her fingertips, and Lisa closed it tightly in her palm. It was so difficult, seeing herself in another life, a normal, healthy life. Untangling herself from the net of pretense and half-lies. Sometimes she tended to forget she was a woman; she was maintaining a display of corporate helpfulness with a customer service smile, a display of daddy's devoted carefree daughter, a display of cheerful friend for a girls' night out but inside there was nothing behind it. Her relationships with other people slowly became shallow and empty, and with that move, she ended up believing she couldn't be cared for, couldn't be loved beyond fatherly concern and affection. And it was even more difficult considering there seemed to be no one who could arouse her interest: after the flight while she still worked at the Lux there were a few men hitting on her- three, to be precise, if one of the cab drivers by contract counted who would persistently hit on her in every second month anyway- but they all left her unaffected. Sometimes she felt something had definitively broken down in her.

"I see myself in a relationship," with a sigh she finally let out the tension but still hid her face from him. "The problem's that I cannot see a point when I'd be able to do something for it… to let it happen."

"That's bullshit. If you come across with the right thing, and realize you really want it, you'll do everything to get it."

She huffed skeptically. He shook his head. As much as he hated even the idea of a fictive, imaginary man who'd be in a relationship with her within five years, he chose to be unselfish just for once now.

"You're ready to pull your life out of this ditch."

"I'm not so sure." She tossed the stone in the water. It landed with a loud splash, scattering the fishes. He strolled over, grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face him.

"You forget you walked up to me at that bar in Texas?"

Her heart wanted to break out of her chest. Lisa forgot even to blink. With huge, green eyes she stared at him unsurely.

"What's your point?" she whispered. He stooped lower to be in eye level with her. His peculiar gaze, so soft yet full of anima, made her freeze completely.

"That you'd be capable of that change… with someone. You'd go for it if you feel it's worth it."

She was staring at him unblinking, her eyes grew even wider, and as she turned her head to avert her gaze at the lake, at the frantic fishes, he could see them brimming with tears. Her lips quivered and she bit them to stop the tremble. He didn't understand what wrong he could possibly say that made her give such reaction, and at a loss, he was simply studying her in silence.

Lisa could feel his gaze on her, and struggled to chase back the tears, the overwhelming sorrow that unexplainably engulfed her at his words. He made it sound like it was nothing special that she'd walked up to him back then, chose him out of all the men hitting on her. Like it wasn't an incredible milestone in the last two years of her life. Like it wouldn't take her another two years. Like it'd easily happen again, just as easily she would come across with someone worth it.

He made it sound like their encounter was a closed period, the past. That, probably, hurt the most.

_With someone_, he said. Someone else.

How would she ever find someone like him again, someone with a story that'd end differently? How would she know it wouldn't end horribly again? Who would be interesting enough to lure her out of her shell?

And suddenly she didn't understand why it hurt so much that he didn't count himself in the category of those men she would start something meaningful with. And more importantly, why she was so keen on finding someone exactly like him as if only a man with his personality and features would be capable of making her go for it. For a horrible, long moment she was sure it was true.

This was the first time Lisa clearly saw the real danger in letting him lull her to this somnambulistic state, letting him wash away the borders between good and bad, with her new impressions obscuring what she knew about him for a fact. Unbeknownst to her, she'd ventured into a swampy territory where she could get lost and sink. And she felt powerless. Suddenly Lisa discovered something that had escaped her so far: the touches she would unconsciously give him. Her skin seemed to be starving for human interactions and it was an inner drive to keep up the physical contact, even if it meant touching _him_. She was turning irrational, completely messed up in the head and overly dependent of him. And that was the first time she was frightened by it, really frightened by the bond between them and where it could escalate. And frightened more of the possibility that it was one-sided.

Lisa blinked back the tears, suddenly sharply aware of his fingers clutching her shoulders, his scent enveloping her, seeping in her head.

That minute she wished he would hug her.

That minute he wished he could hug her.

Instead, he went with what he was the best in. What he deemed safe.

"This time what's this new emotional hellhole about?"

His slightly annoyed voice was the only thing that helped Lisa revive and pull up her defense. "This wind gives me a headache," she lied, and faced him. Rippner's eyes flashed dangerously.

"Lisa…!" It was a warning.

Through her newfound despair to hide her thoughts from him, Lisa stared somewhere over his shoulder, and gasped. "I remember that place. They have the best pies." Shaking off his hands, she started across the park. Rippner glared after her with a questioning look. "Come on. I need those pies now," she mumbled under her breath. It was a Bridget Jones-symptom but right now she needed a rebound spoiling. Or just simply make this scene end before he would lure words she didn't want to utter out of her. He had the ability to do so.

"Is it really necessary?" Rippner stopped short in front of the low building, eying the lime-green walls, hay-colored and -copy roof and golden round windows with a bit repulsed look. "Are we in Hobbiton?"

Lisa didn't give him time to mull whether he wanted to enter or not. There was something she obviously didn't want to talk about, and Rippner instinctively felt this time he wouldn't make her elaborate. It didn't mean though that he would let her run around alone, even if it forced him to join her in a place that looked like something right out of Tim Burton's head, a bit crazy and bit tale-like. The interior with the black-and-white checkered floor and the vivid colors of Chinese lanterns, the old vintage cash register and the sweet scent lingering in the air assembled into something he would normally very much avoid.

Lisa turned her head and seeing the look on Rippner's face, she beckoned him in with a smile. A tall guy in a white apron, with dreamy eyes and a cute smile greeted them behind the counter. The place wasn't packed, only two other tables were occupied. Lisa slipped in a booth with Rippner lagging behind only for a moment, and soon a petite waitress with a blond bob came up to their table.

"Welcome to the Pie Hole. I'm Olive, what pie do you love today?"

Lisa peered into the menu. "An apple-Gruyere for me." Rippner ordered a tomato-mustard for him.

Only when their pies were served, did they break the silence. Looking up from his plate, Rippner squinted at her. "So, after what you said in the park, I take Barry isn't Mr. Right?"

Confused, Lisa eyed him. "Who?"

"Don't tell me you already forgot him." With a strange glint in his eyes, he added explanatorily. "Barry Bonds."

"The base-?"

Lisa bit at her tongue with a funny expression that told him she knew she was caught but it didn't keep him from correcting her seriously that made her turn even more flustered and amused at the same time.

"No, not the baseball player. Some sales guy at the Lux."

Lisa stabbed a bite on her fork. "Shit."

She looked out the window, trying to contain the burst of laughter building in her chest but felt her lips twitching. She had long forgotten the fake-date with a fake-guy she'd made up for herself somewhere back in Illinois just to defy Rippner. How he could still remember it was beyond her. Eventually she had to laugh, too, when Rippner did. The moment was somehow, despite the ghost of a past lie, almost delicate. His eyes were sparkling in a way Lisa had never seen before, giving his gaze a full new tone. They were beautiful, the color, the sparks, the tiny dark blue dots around the pupils; she found herself staring, absorbing the new look of his whole face, and her heart convulsed with sudden regret. Or it could be yearning; the two went hand in hand sometimes. _If…_ _If only-_

_If only._

Her gaze dropped and Lisa glared into her plate. If only? If only what? It was getting ridiculous. She was.

They finished their pies in silence. Lisa could feel the unwavering attention Rippner was giving her from the other side of the table but she didn't find enough courage and clear discernment in her to meet his gaze. Everything had horribly jumbled up in her head.

At the counter, glancing at the long list of pies, Lisa decided to bring Duke a few slices. While Olive was preparing a neat pack for them and waited for the blackberry flavored (Duke's favorite) to get baked, Rippner disappeared in the restroom. Lisa looked after him with haunted eyes- now when she knew he didn't see her, she dared-, and when she turned back to the counter, caught the dreamy-eyed guy staring at her with a frown.

When it eventually happened, Lisa could only wonder how it hadn't happened earlier. Of course, wondering only after giving a performance she was almost proud of. Maybe she really was getting the hang of acting and lying.

Dreamy-eyed guy stared and asked. "Aren't you the girl from the news?"

Her smile trembled as Lisa blinked in confusion. Her heart thundered in her chest in a wild pace. "What girl?"

"The one who the police are searching for."

Still smiling, Lisa asked, feeling not only the guy's but Olive's attention peak. "Is she some criminal?"

"No, she was kidnapped by one."

"Oh, really?"

Her head turned involuntarily toward the restroom, half to hide her anxiety, half to search for Rippner who performed the best timing ever by stepping out the door in that very moment, unsuspecting to the scene unfolding at the counter. Lisa spoke up with a cheery voice that sent a flash of astonishment through his eyes. So did her words.

"Honey, they say I look like some girl from the news who's gotten kidnapped."

As Rippner stepped to her with an amused look on his face, she snaked a shy arm around his waist. In turn, his snaked around hers, too.

"Oh, do you?" he smiled easily though his eyes betrayed pure alarm, and to keep up the façade, Lisa lifted herself up on tiptoes and, not without a lurch of excitement shooting through her belly, brushed her face against his somewhere between his cheek and mouth – she couldn't bring herself to touch his skin with her mouth, not even if it blew their cover. It went easily, the question _and_ the touch – both contained a part of something true and right.

"Did you kidnap me, sweetie?"

"Definitely, and would do it anytime again," he mumbled, kissing her forehead. He sounded so genuine that Lisa shuddered against his chest, buried her face in the folds of his sports coat, inhaled his soothing scent and smiled as his arms formed a full circle around her shoulders. They were so good, she thought contentedly as she peeked at dreamy-eyed guy.

"Oh, sorry," he laughed. "I must've been mistaken."

Rippner could feel the man's eyes on them as they waited for the damn pie to be baked – maybe they weren't convincing enough for him. He was extremely glad now that he'd shaved that morning and cut his hair into a less scruffy style, looking less similar to his picture on the news.

He pulled Lisa closer, encircling her shoulders with a lazy arm, more like in an attempt to keep her from dashing out of the shop, leaving their order and everything else behind – he knew she was pondering exactly that, and the irony of the turn of events amused him, the fact that unlike any other times when he'd felt it was sensible to be precautious about her for he could never know when she'd try to draw attention and betray him, it was clear for him now that she wanted anything but. Her body felt like a rock against his, an overstrained coil spring. Leaning close to her ear and pretending a kiss on her temple, he whispered tauntingly.

"I know the term's unfamiliar to you, but try to _relax_."

She didn't really give the reaction he anticipated, none of the 'I will show you' attitude. In the glass of the container on the counter where they kept an assortment of colorful muffins and cookies, he could see her scowl, and if it was possible she felt even more rigid, more nervous. He was sure she wasn't aware of her nails digging in his side like vulture claws.

He didn't know that Lisa was more worried about the strangers, about what Rippner could do to them, than for herself or him.

For greater good, that's what Rippner told himself then.

If he was aware of its obvious fakeness, he would have mocked himself as he usually did with Lisa when he caught her in deceiving herself. As it happened, he lied to himself so convincingly that it never even crossed his mind that it wasn't the entire truth.

So when suspicious guy went to pull the pie out of the oven, doing so with dividing his attention between the action and them, Rippner- _for greater good_- whispered to Lisa warningly: "Don't protest."

The question -_what?_- died on her tongue as he leant in and kissed her.

The world seemed to shrink down to the two black and white tiles they were standing on, a black for one, a white for the other; everything else beyond the periphery of her senses that were focused solely on him was erased completely. Lisa had no illusion that she would never process it, his lips against hers. The sensation, the mere fact paralyzed her.

Her mind offered three reactions, all similar in intensity and different in rationality. The first was the knee-jerk reflex to push him away. As soon as it registered, his previous warning registered too, and she settled with the second reaction instead: motionless resignation just to survive the moment. Her fingers curled in his shirt at his side, not sure if they were meant to push or pull him.

The third reaction, in fact, came delayed so much that it was already too late. It whispered to her to move her mouth and return the kiss. And just when her lips were about to tremble against his, someone croaked. Then croaked again.

A bit disorientated, with an apologetic look, Rippner blinked at blond-bob Olive and the package of pies in her hand. She just smiled back in return with a knowing look. More than automatically than anything else, Lisa took the sweet-scented paper bundle from her; if she was asked at the moment, it could've been a half pound of raw meat, or a time bomb even. Her mind was yet to catch up with the present. She didn't know, but Rippner's was, too.

They'd have been surprised to learn how short it lasted: three seconds of complete oblivion. For anyone else it wouldn't have been more than a simple peck; for them, it was like calling a hurricane a breeze – not because of the power it contained but the mess it left behind.

As dreamy-eyed guy fumbled with the cash register and picked out their change, Lisa caught Rippner watching her, and she knew she was blushing from top to toe. All she could grasp was the fact that she didn't die. That his lips were soft and warm like of any other man. And up from close she could catch the scent of mustard. Maybe if her brain wouldn't have shut down, if her nerve-endings wouldn't have blown, she could've also _tasted _it. At that, a ripple of shiver ran down her back, hot or cold, it was hard to tell but it raised all the hair on her arms.

"All right. Let's go, babe." Rippner took her free hand and they said a half-numb goodbye on the way out. Lisa felt a drunken smile creep on her face as the pet name was unexpectedly tickling her stomach.

When the door closed behind them, Lisa heard him curse under his breath, presumably and more than anything, _hopefully_ at dreamy-eyed guy. It was raining lightly again. Rippner kept her in place right by the door, and pulled up her hood, brushing her locks under it. He had a dark scowl on his face that was in sharp contrast with his gentle touch. She cast her eyes down, unable to look at him. Look at his lips. _You've just tasted them_, her mind whispered to her, and she inwardly groaned. Her mental firewall against unwanted, unsafe thoughts switched on. She just couldn't… shouldn't…

"How could he recognize you on that hideous picture?"

"Thank you!" she snapped offended, but Rippner wasn't paying attention.

"He's still watching us, isn't he?" He had his back toward the diner so it was Lisa's duty to check if his suspicion was right but Rippner had an expression that made her blood run cold.

"No one is around, of course he's looking at us," she said quickly, fearing Rippner would dash back and slaughter everyone any minute. She stepped so close that their toes met and snuggled her face closer to his, cheek brushing against cheek, and from the cover of his shoulder she sneaked a look through the window. She knew from inside they looked like kissing, and the idea sent a tremor through her limbs. His intimate proximity did the same. "And he's just turned away now."

"Resourceful, you are. It's a good thing I really stole you."

He grabbed her hand again, and started down the street. Lisa felt like pacing in a dream where she lost control over her limbs. The hoodie started to get soaked on her shoulders but her skin was so warm like she had fever. His palm against hers felt like gripping hot iron. She didn't dare to look at him, retreated back behind the hood and tried to gain back the control over her senses. They rounded the corner and as soon as they got out of sight for anyone possibly watching them from the Pie Hole, he let her hand go. The sudden coldness was just as much unsettling now as his touch had been.

They were silent for the rest of the walk, Rippner terribly on edge, Lisa in usual denial, fenced off with iron grates. The flopping in her stomach upset her because though it was laced with dread, there was definitely something else she didn't want to scrutinize. But the way Rippner handled the situation was offensive to her feelings. He behaved like he was angry with her: maybe for her picture on the news, or that he had to resort to an emergency solution at the Pie Hole.

She didn't know Rippner was rather angry with himself. Angry with the way his body reacted at the ridiculously fleeting touch of her lips. He wasn't a first-kiss school boy anymore, for crying out loud.

His senses were glued to her, lips tickling by the mere memory of brushing them against hers, head full of incoherent thoughts; if he'd managed to get past the stony lips, the dangerous row of teeth, he might've been able to taste the cinnamon on her tongue – and he had to bite his own tongue at the thought, the pain eliminating the arousal before it could fully be born. He peeked at her hands, a nervous knot around the paper package, tangle of rigid, white fingers, her eyes fixating a spot somewhere ahead, anything but looking at him – and his mouth became a thin line at the obvious denial- _repulsion_- she was in right now. The way she'd gone completely still like a statue in his arms told him everything. If they didn't have an audience, she would have been beating him over the head with the furniture and fixtures.

If they didn't have an audience… oh, fuck the audience, that wouldn't have stopped him from giving her a sample of his whole palette of PDA. It was fortunate his practical, professional side was so deeply embedded in his behavior that it'd kept him from doing something utterly stupid. Too bad it hadn't stopped him from pulling that particular stunt back at the Pie Hole. _For greater good, yeah, right._

Somehow it terribly felt like his own plan came back and bit him in the ass, now that he thought about it; it was the same as it had been on the plane: at his involuntary touches she reacted with recoil. His lips turned into a sour curve. Of course, it was allowed only for her to touch him, for him it was a restricted area. The bitter frustration almost choked him, and he couldn't quite listen to the rational thought whispering him that he couldn't blame her for not being a teenage girl with hormone hyperfunction.

When they arrived at Duke's and the door closed behind him with a resounding click, he felt like he just entered a crypt where there wasn't enough air to breathe. For fuck's sake, he wasn't even sure he could look at her without thinking of how it'd been kissing her. That'd have been his utter failure over himself, that is, the rebellion of his thoughts, and right now he wasn't ready to deal with it. As Lisa went toward the kitchen, she cast a glance back at him, a timid, fluttering glance that made him, unceremoniously and embarrassingly, want to flee.

"You're not coming?"

And a dark, sticky, muddy part of him, the utterly cool part of him that never ceased to claim control and authority and the same- basically, in a way- coward part that trembled at the thought of not being in charge, the part that he would (he was sure) be ashamed of later, in hindsight; this part wanted to hurt her, shatter whatever power she had over him, because it seemed to be the only ointment on his trouble. This part of him mustered his misery, ill-fated lust, even his self-loathing and turned them into a monster of sarcasm that drenched his voice.

"No thanks. I've been locked up with you and your emotional little dramas for long enough now."

He turned abruptly but not before he could catch the sting of hurt flicker through her eyes that left an insistent ache in his chest; he pulled the door open and stepped out, not bothering with the pouring rain outside. He knew a whole campaign of self-chastisement was in store for him. There wasn't enough road to walk that would let him vent the tension properly after what he'd just pulled – what he'd _tried_ to pull, he rephrased because it felt like a task to make a river flow backwards.

He came back only around ten, soaked, tired but strained like a game, went straight for a shower, and without bothering to check on the others in the house, he switched off the lights in the living room and went to sleep.

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_**A/N:** Virtual pies for those who find out whic movie/series had a cameo here. So very difficult... at least for those who don't know it. ;)_  
_Thanks for reading._


	13. A cross to bear

**A/N:** A whole bunch of virtual pies were e-shipped. Indeed, the cameo in the previous chapter was from Pushing daisies:)

Okay, so, here's the next chapter. I have to admit, I got a tight throat even by the mere idea of uploading this, especially after seeing how much you seemed to like the previous chapter (thank you again for the nice reviews - your praise is crushing me:)). I had a lot of trouble with this one, and I'm all sweaty thinking what you'd say about it.  
I have to mention here that I had a truly wonderful help this time: Evelyn Benton was so nice to beta this for me. Her suggestions were invaluable, and I really believe it turned out better than it originally had been, so I'm really grateful that you get to read this version instead of that one. Thank you so much, Evelyn.

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**Chapter 13: A cross to bear**

Lisa woke up with a dead weight over her heart. The feeling was very similar to those that would subdue her in confusing mornings when she'd gone to bed the previous night with the hope that after a horrible day or some horrible news she'd just learned, she would wake up and find that all had been only a nightmare. The disappointment that would usually dawn on her even before gaining back full consciousness was the same now; without having opened her eyes yet, awareness slowly chewed and shredded the edges of sleep as she still clung to those hazy, unreal images of a satisfyingly untrue dream – but her heart would already know the truth. It always did, as did the back of her mind, too. She knew that her parents got divorced, and it hadn't been a sick nightmare. That she was raped. That her grandmother really died. That there was a man who managed to touch something deep within her that nobody had been able to touch for years and she shouldn't have let him. That something had changed forever. Knew that he mattered. And she also knew that he'd hurt her. He had hurt her with the simple truth that whatever he'd evoked in her obviously wasn't in balance with anything she evoked in him, if she had evoked in him anything at all.

So she opened her eyes with the notion that all she wanted was to crawl under the blanket and stay there for all day till she'd make her heart, the back of her mind believe that nothing was real. That he hadn't reached an untouched spot in her. That he hadn't induced pain there.

She felt sick and weak and wrung out like an old sponge. Sleep had come with difficulty at night, and when she finally drifted off, it wasn't without the unsettling suspicion that a part of the reason for her anew sleeping disorder was because she'd grown addicted to his proximity.

Lisa pulled up the blanket to her chin and buried her face in the pillow with a pathetic groan. Somehow she had the ridiculous feeling like she'd been slowly transforming into something unknown and strange, and the change was irreversible; maybe Bruce Banner would have the same sensation before turning big and green and very angry.

Smiling at her own simile, Lisa climbed out of bed. Padding toward the bathroom, she halted in the middle of the hall and listened. The house was quiet. The ghost of a suspicion clicked in her stomach, and she frowned. Turning, she went to the stairs and crouching a bit, peeked in the living room. She had a perfect view at the couch and the television, the front windows and the street beyond them. Her stomach dropped a foot.

The couch was empty; the comforter lay draped over the back, neatly folded. Rippner's laptop bag and suitcase that had been stationed under the window between a huge ficus and a fern were gone.

Her thoughts rushed down on memory lane, and a wave of inconvenient hot flush washed over her body as she remembered the Pie Hole, remembered his lips against her, but it was closely followed by shivers, recalling his cold demeanor afterwards. Remembered how Rippner had complained he had to spend too much time with her. And with a sudden start she recalled that according to the plans, they were leaving today. Her heart hammered against her ribs in a deranged speed. Could it be that he left without her?

"Jackson," she called hesitantly, from the bottom of her monster chuckhole of hurt and perplex. Only silence reigned, and she repeated. "Jackson?"

The blood rushed out of her head so quickly, that she had to lean against the wall for support. He couldn't leave like this, without saying goodbye. Without her.

They still had a week, a week to cross the country back to Washington, a whole week for talking to him, teasing him. Seeing him.

Suddenly his cutting, harsh words that had bothered her just a few moments before didn't matter anymore, and the hurt they'd evoked perished in the more urgent worry to find him.

She ran down the stairs. The living room, the kitchen and the hallway were all empty.

_If he was gone, how will you track him down?_ her mind nudged her, and Lisa shook her head, to joggle the feeling of loss out that served as a block in her thoughts. It felt she lost all directions and didn't know where to go from here. On the periphery of her consciousness, she was aware that her momentary emotional storm was everything but rational.

She found Duke sitting on the back porch with the morning paper and a cup of tea. He looked up at her with his usual smile, and Lisa found difficulty to honestly return it. An alien feeling was rattling in her chest.

Still on the verge of panic that normally should have surprised her but momentarily went rather unnoticed, she asked. "Where's Jackson? Please don't tell me he left without me!"

Duke frowned at her with a bit of uncertainty and revulsion. The answer, however, came from behind Lisa.

"He didn't. But probably he should have."

Lisa swirled around on her heels, relief flooding her. The mosquito net swung close behind her with a snap serving almost as a dramatic cue. Rippner was standing in the doorway to the garage, all dressed and obviously ready to go. She stepped toward him, her arms drawing an arch in the air as if she wanted to hug him with the enormous leap of her heart, with the world tipping back in balance. It was her mind that stopped the movement, and her fingers dropped, grazing his sleeves lightly. Somehow strangling the half-born movement had left her with an empty feeling. He didn't retreat but didn't acknowledge the touch either, and maybe it was for the best.

"I thought…" Lisa smiled faintly but it wavered at his neutral expression; if anything, it was rather resentful. "Where were you?"

"Loaded my stuff in the car."

"You're not planning to go alone, are you?"

Level-headed, he remarked. "What I said before is still valid. You can stay if you want."

_If you want_; here it meant, she could sense it: _I want you to_. The blood seemed to rush out of her legs at his matter-of-factly voice. The sensation was the same when, after a horrible fall in the ice-skating rink, the doctors had told her that she would never be able to figure skate competitively again: the feeling of loss. She studied his face timidly.

"Are you still angry with me?"

"Why would I?"

His confusion appeared to be honest, if it was good news or bad, she didn't know, and Lisa shrugged with a quivering smile. Her voice was less steady than she liked.

"For the pies."

A twitch of an eyebrow as Rippner replied: "No."

His expression turned into a scowl. This was the last thing he wanted to be reminded of, let alone talk about. He could have walked to Alabama with the frustration boiling in him last night, and it wasn't a feeling he was accustomed to. However pathetic he found his own reaction to the pies- oh great, now he just picked up her little euphemism; a few more days, and he would talk using bees and birds and all that shit-, he couldn't deny it was unique, the yearning was; the memory itself that, like a giant brick cubicle, sat in the middle of his mind, and every train of thought collided with it, had to go through it, skirt it, when she was around him. Even when she wasn't.

"Am I interfering with your plans? Slowing you down? If so, then I understand and will stay here."

_You're only messing with my mind_, he thought. He had to get rid of her, for his own safety and sanity.

Behind her back, he could see Duke's silhouette through the mosquito net, and he was briefly wondering if the old man was eavesdropping on them. If he did, he was sure as hell just as puzzled at Lisa's insistence to accompany him as he was.

Through narrowed eyes, Rippner looked at her, trying to listen to the voice that nagged him to open his mouth and lie, but couldn't.

"No."

She gave a real smile this time, and he offered a taut one in return.

"Then you'll wait for me." It wasn't a request, rather a command. A command normally he would give. She pursed her lips and stretched her palm out to him. "The car key?"

Rippner had an amused smile tugged in the corner of his lips. "You think I couldn't hot wire the car?"

"You provoke me and I lock you up with the cleaning supplies."

He smirked. He couldn't help it; she was wonderful. She was improving. Balancing him, matching, challenging, copying. His goddamn equal. As much as he hated the fact, the feeling was tickling him all the way down to his stomach. Even further down. She undoubtedly had a way with him. The mocking reminder of their second encounter when he'd pushed her into the closet in his apartment in Miami right after she'd showed undesired interest in his boning knife, the skew way she verbally threw it back in his face now was amusing. So he handed her the key; after all, better be safe, isn't it? Not that Duke had such closet.

It was late morning when Lisa finished packing and had a fulfilling breakfast; she didn't want to be marking time for too long and risking Rippner lose patience. By the time she was ready to go, he'd already put her suitcase in the trunk and parked the car in the street.

Lisa hugged Duke tightly, and for a fleeting moment was tempted to stay. "Just one more week and it's over," she said solemnly. "If you talk to Mom, you think you can keep it a secret just a little longer? I'll call her and you after it."

"It's okay, don't worry."

Duke saw her out with a sad smile, and she could tell he was already feeling lonely. Four days weren't too much but could do that to someone living alone. Their mere presence had filled the house with life.

"Are you sure about this?"

At the entrance, on the beige rectangle of the doormat, Lisa cast a look at the Audi beside the curb. Rippner was already sitting in the car. Through the tinted glass she could see only his vague silhouette, albeit Lisa was sure he was sitting there drumming on the wheel with impatient fingers.

"Yes, I am," she smiled.

Duke hugged her again. He squeezed her arm, and frowned. "Don't forget for a minute who he really is."

Lisa, a bit dizzily, nodded but without much conviction, puzzled as to why he felt the need to remind her of something so obvious. But as she scurried to the car, she had the sudden inkling- realization, even- that in fact the warning might have come way too late.

: :

They were back on it, on their personal _It Happened One Night_. Except it happened one month. And there was no Clark Gable with his insolent charm around. Not that Rippner lacked any, if wanted: the insolence _and_ charm. And she wasn't referring to the ending either, not even grazing it with her thoughts, no; after all, that was a romantic comedy, no less. This wasn't; their version of a road movie was, if anything, twisted and absurd, sometimes witty with quips and jests, then dangerous and long and tiring; and maybe sometimes less entertaining. She loved that movie, had watched it fifty times probably. Reality was something else. Something, that against all senses, she could enjoy, too.

After their four days of hiatus in the road trip, Lisa discovered a hiatus in their communication as well. Or rather, lack of communication, it was.

She moved with an air of uncertainty around him; it wasn't like she'd forgotten how to handle him, how unpredictable his mood swings could be, more to the contrary: she recognized a connection sort of, the infallible insight into him, but its existence per se made her doubt its accuracy, and with that, continuously second-guess her own approach. Rippner, like the hyena he was, the top carnivore in the food chain, sensed her indecision with cruel precision and in his acts and words tried to gain the upper hand. Lisa had, however, a steady yet overly sensitive persistence that let her endure whatever attitude Rippner was showing. He kept a safe distance and mostly enveloped in silence back in Wyoming and throughout whole South Dakota, but by the time they entered Minnesota, her tireless adaptation to his mood that left her seemingly unfazed by him, and a constant pressure to knock him out of that state resulted in him warming up again. And then, all was fine with the world again for her.

The trip itself was anything but overstrained as Rippner had made a lot of stops and detours, never driving an insane amount of hours a day, and Lisa was okay with it. It seemed to her that being on the move relieved him of much tension. She had no idea how close she was. Rippner hoped that being back in action would result in the redirection of his thoughts off the route they'd taken back at Duke's, and he'd see and think clearly again. He hadn't suspected for a minute that he would bring those moments and memories with him like a scent that would stay even days later, linger around him and seep in his head. It was hard to air that scent when Lisa was around, and for that, he couldn't blame anyone but himself.

On their fourth morning on the road, she stared out the windshield at the black cloud of crows flying frantically, without order. The sky was overcast, dark grey and gloomy.

"Just exactly what we needed," Rippner grumbled grimly, following her gaze. Lisa looked at him questioningly. "It's going to snow."

A grin spread over her face, and she bit back an excited squeal before it could completely break out. Rippner glanced over at her from the corner of his eyes, perfectly balancing between amusement and annoyance.

"You like snow?"

She smiled at him, this time it was addressed to Rippner and not the weather conditions. Unbeknownst to both of them, they reveled in the fact that it was something he hadn't known about her.

"Childhood memories. Every year we used to spend a week in Maine. For someone living in Miami, snow is a curiosity. You?"

A little frown over his narrowed eyes; two perfect blue slits, the bluest blue. The most beautiful, she decided. His words were less unearthly.

"A setback. Inconvenience. A factor that must be considered. And it betrays you with the footprints."

She glared at him. "Jesus, Jackson, do you _ever_ think as a normal human being? Skynet should have put a kill switch on you," she remarked annoyed but very quickly realized by his slowly growing smirk that he'd been joking.

He chuckled. He didn't want to tell her it felt not only there was a kill switch but she'd already pushed it. Sat on it with her full weight.

By the time they crossed the border to Wisconsin, it was littering the windshield with fluffy snowflakes.

It was Thanksgiving that day. Lisa only realized it late afternoon when the Audi cautiously moved forward in the heavy snowfall and she glanced out at the city center running away beyond the window. She let out a wistful 'Oh!' upon seeing the small winter market in a normally surely boring square, but with the snow covering it, it bordered on being charming. Her eyes followed the garland of colorful lights in the shop windows, the cheerful, sometimes too much over the top decorations. Christmas was due in a month, she realized that too.

They got red light. Rippner jerked the wiper on for what seemed the thousandth time in the previous five hours, and squinted out at the streets. Then looked over at her from the corner of his eyes, at the 'Oh' still lingering over her lips, in her eyes. He wanted to keep it there, the awe, the dreamy expression.

Lisa, sitting sideways in her seat, lay her head on the headrest and gave him a small smile. The taillights of the car before them tinted the snowflakes on the windshield red, and painted a lively hue on his cheekbones as though the cold wind had nipped them. She briefly wondered how he usually spent Christmas, if he would plan assassinations or ever killed someone that particular day. She didn't know why it mattered, wasn't sure if it'd have made him less of a heartless monster. Somehow she couldn't imagine him decorating a tree, wrapping gifts in golden paper and red ribbons – the very message and atmosphere of Christmas didn't reconcile with who he was. That somehow squeezed her heart.

After the light switched to green, Rippner made an unexpected right turn, then another one, and after a minute of silent driving and very secretive and deliberate disregard of her inquiring stare, he parked a car in the adjoining small lot of a building. Lisa peered out the window at what pretty much looked like a family-run hotel. Then squinted at the clock in the dashboard. It was too early to settle for the night.

"Why are we stopping?"

He had the little smile over his lips that equally annoyed and appealed to her as he turned off the engine and unbuckled his seatbelt. "I thought you wanted to check out that market across the street."

She gaped after him incredulously as he shot a smirk toward her way, allowing a shower of snow in the car as he opened the door and climbed out. He was like this all the time, never ceasing to surprise her, and deep inside Lisa admitted she wouldn't have wanted it any other way. She lingered only for a moment behind before joining him in the picturesque snowfall. Suddenly, she wanted to laugh and roll about in the snow just like when she was a little girl; she closed her eyes and tipped her head back as Rippner pulled their luggage out of the trunk.

Their hotel room was a pretty one for a change. It didn't have the nondescript and impersonal colors and interior so typical of roadside motel rooms. In the room, beside the two beds, there was a nice couch in front of the TV set, and if Lisa leant out far enough over the balcony rails, she could see the inviting colorful smudges of the Christmas lights of the main square.

"So?" she pulled on an extra sweater before taking on her coat, and looked at Rippner with a puzzled expression. He was settled on the couch with Yellow Bastard's laptop and his cell phone, and turned his head toward her just as puzzled at her question. "I thought we would have a walk to the center."

"Not really. _You_ would."

Suddenly, Lisa was no longer in the mood for a walk but covered with a playful blink the sudden change of mood that left even her fairly nonplussed. "You're letting me walk around unattended?"

He chuckled, and announced very solemnly. "My rigor is slipping. I'd take the opportunity while it lasts."

Lisa nodded. Strolled to the door. Halted and glanced back at him. She tried not to sound too open and inviting; too desperate. "You're not planning to come at all?"

He already had the laptop on and was scrolling down in the menu of the mobile phone. At that, he tipped his head back, and took her face in, the wavering uncertainty of her fingers around the doorknob. He knew the right answer, his mind knew. But lately he had a problem with the connection between that and his tongue. Scratch that, between his mind and all the other parts of his body when she looked at him like this. Like she didn't want to be left alone anymore. Like she didn't want to go without him.

"I have to settle something. Won't take long. I'll catch up with you in the square, okay?"

Lisa smiled lightly. "Okay."

When she left, Rippner stood from the couch and stepped to the window. From the cover of the curtains he was following her steps as she sauntered down the street, watching her own footsteps in the inch-high snow. He smiled softly, imagining the look she had to have on her face right now, recalling the look she'd just given him. Even he amazed himself with the change in their relations but couldn't decide if, all in all, it was his or her doing.

He pressed the cell to his ear, and cursed the whole damn issue he had to deal with now. Henry picked it up after the third ring.

"You have the samples prepared?" Rippner asked.

"Just sending it to you. The best we could get. Even the size of the dummy is perfect."

Rippner shuffled back to the couch, pushed a key on the laptop. "Just arrived."

He opened the files, left the .jpg for the last. He studied it with an ill feeling stirring up his stomach, and closed it with a grimace. He shouldn't feel like this, he knew. Where was his collected coolness?

"You're still in their database?" Henry asked.

"Yep, no worries. What about the hard copies?"

"Taken care of. I have someone at the hospital, another one at the HQ. All's fine."

"Excellent, thanks."

"So is it Monday then?"

"Yes. Alvarez confirmed it yesterday. He's gonna call me with the details on Sunday."

"Fine. Then talk to you on Sunday."

Rippner threw the phone on the couch and sat beside it with a heavy sigh. He pulled the laptop in his lap, and started to work on the files carefully, with the lingering thought in the back of his mind that the sooner he was done, the sooner he could join Lisa.

: :

She was struggling with the shell of a roasted chestnut when he found her in the middle of the local poor imitation of European winter markets but Lisa, who had seen those only in movies, didn't seem to mind it a bit. The snow hadn't stopped for a minute, and the thickening coat covering the streets somehow muffled everything around them as if somebody just grabbed the Big Switch of the world and turned down the volume. Rippner glanced around with a frown, watching the people around them, the shivering stallholders, impatient parents and all too noisy kids with candy canes. Nothing suspicious. It was peaceful, yet it set him on the edge. That, or the countdown in his head. Four more days. His eyes swam to Lisa's fragile form as she leant against the rail around a makeshift skating rink and watched the people race around. _Four more days and we-_ He pressed his lips together angrily. _We_. Like the word had any meaning in connection with them.

He shouldn't screw it right before the finish. Again. Again because of her. Because of what she was doing to him. What he was letting her do to him. This would be over, and he would ride into the sunset and never feel this attachment, addiction anymore. It would be over, and he would tear these ropes apart between them forever. He'd be able to think clearly again, recall the blessed, unshakably rational and practical side of him that was in hiding nowadays.

Why did it terribly feel like only wishful thinking then? Why did it feel like he would never find peace till he had her? And even after that?

The mere fact that on some point she'd stopped treating him the guy she'd met on the plane equally annoyed and appealed to him, but it was undeniable how much he'd underestimated its effect on him; how it let him take a trifling look into a world unknown for him so far, and he was afraid he wouldn't be able to simply shake it off and walk away like it was a coat he could discard anytime and buy a new one – such things weren't usual in his line of business. Things like normal human relations with normal people. Things like acceptance.

He reclined on his elbows beside Lisa, and studied her freely as she was still training her eyes on the tottering kids on the ice.

"Why did you stop skating?"

She shrugged. "Sprained ankle ligament, the usual. Never again could properly perform an Axel jump."

"That's a pity," he remarked.

"I was depressed for a month but it's fine. I finished, so to say, at the peak. Right after that photo in the news was taken."

Though he instantly regretted it, Rippner admitted with a small smile: "I wish I could've seen you back then."

Lisa straightened out, and he was surprised to see a rosy blush spreading over her cheeks. Her smile was timid and proud at the same time. "I was good. Better than in field hockey."

"Hard to believe," he grimaced, and with that, earned a laugh from her. It was a good thing, he considered, that she could already find amusement in their not too glorious past. He certainly welcomed the development.

"Is that mulled wine?" Lisa sniffed suddenly, tipping her head back slightly like a gun dog attempting to pick up a scent. Her scarf rode down, exposing her doe-like slender neck, and he found himself staring wistfully. Staring at the shallow, soft hollow on the sides of her throat, just right below her jaw line. He remembered how soft her skin felt against his palm, and he was subdued by sudden embarrassment at the memory of his iron fingers around her throat. It felt like no less than profanation to him right now.

Before he knew it, Lisa grabbed his wrist- not his hand, never touching him that directly- and pulled at him. Her hand was warm against his cool skin, and Rippner let her lead him to the line at a nearby stall.

There was a strand of twinkle lights hung on the stall, smearing colorful smudges over the snowflakes. As Lisa looked at him, Rippner could see the lights reflected in her eyes, little blinking cheerful dots; and her face, her hair looked so soft that all he wanted was to reach out and touch her, bury his face in the yellow-red-green tinted curls, inhale her scent and never let her go again. She looked achingly beautiful, almost untouchably so.

He turned his face away morosely. It didn't escape his attention that her hand hadn't dropped.

"You don't want some?"

Her voice came from closer than he'd expected- maybe she'd moved toward him, maybe he had- but he opted to stand there without looking at her. It was safer this way. In the sweet scent of the wine, with the burning spots her fingertips branded on his palm, it was all he could do not to succumb to his physical needs. In an attempt to divert his mind off the unwanted, ever recurring course, he ran his eyes around at the crowd but completely unseeing. For his part, there could've been an army of snipers and special forces lurking behind the clumsy snowmen around the park, ready to attack, with his current state of mind he wouldn't discover them unless they were waving a red flag at him. Maybe not even then.

"No," he mumbled absent-mindedly. Probably not even as an answer to her question, rather as disapproval of his own train of thoughts.

"You don't like it?"

"Does it really matter now?"

"You never enjoy anything?"

That made him look at her. He took in her scoffing gaze, the jeering curve of her upper lip. She squeezed his hand and even that wasn't without tease.

"I do, believe me," and he watched as his trademark smirk made her scrunch up her face and form the little dimples at the side of her nose. They were absolutely adorable, even if his mind recoiled from using that particular word. He watched the light blush lacing her cheeks a little longer than necessary before noted with academic seriousness. "But right now it can get us killed."

Lisa rolled her eyes, and he wasn't sure that she couldn't see through his pathetic excuse. Tipping her head to the side, she looked up at him with a small smirk that made her just as much innocent as cheeky.

"It may very well be our last Thanksgiving, so why not enjoy it as long as we can?" She didn't mention that _together_ it surely was their last; even adding it inwardly made her choke up at the thought.

His eyebrow quirked with amusement. It was funny how the roles had changed. He remembered their bickering about her favorite yellow M&M's just a few weeks ago. Now she was giving him a lesson on hedonism.

"You sure?" she asked, finally letting his hand go to hold her plastic cup, and he smiled at the question, at the fact that for a change now it was Lisa who asked it with the same intonation she was usually on the receiving end of.

"No."

She looked up at him from behind the rim of the cup. With a smirk, he pulled it away from her lips, twisted his hand so he would touch the exact same spot she'd just had- perhaps to irritate her, perhaps because this was the closest he would ever get again to her lips-, and took a sip. It tickled his tongue. The wine, or her taste he imagined steeped into the plastic.

"Not bad," he handed back the cup. And as an afterthought, he added: "But I've tasted better things."

He sucked in his lower lip, and let his gaze drop briefly to her lips, the insinuation clear to him and Rippner entertained himself with this small moment of truth.

Lisa, unsure how to interpret it, or maybe unwilling to do so, opted for taking a huge gulp, only belatedly realizing how naturally it went, drinking from the same cup. She turned and ventured back to the skating rink, and Rippner followed her with a crooked smirk.

They were standing at the rails for long minutes without talking, and it was Rippner who found himself annoyed by it. He studied her expression, the half-closed eyes, the almost invisible crease between her brows, and he knew she wasn't there, but he was too selfish to let her retreat to somewhere he couldn't check on her.

"Let me guess," he drawled. "Feeling sappy and nostalgic?"

She narrowed her eyes. "Let me guess. Being an insensible jerk?"

"It suggests I've stopped being so," he chuckled.

She chuckled, too. "My bad."

Rippner took a musing look at his watch. "So this time you'd normally roast the turkey at Daddy's?"

"No, that's my Dad's job. I'd cook my heavenly pumpkin soup." When he made a funny grimace, Lisa added. "Almost as heavenly as my scrambled eggs. You can only regret missing out on it."

He regretted, that was for sure. Maybe not exactly the soup, but everything it implied, everything that would come with it.

"That's always been the tradition. Even after their divorce." She absently flicked the snow off the rail with her fingers. "But it never was the same again. Maybe because nothing could compete with Mom's gravy," she added, laughing, but Rippner could see the lingering sadness behind her gaze.

"Now among a lot of things, I became a tradition-killer, too."

"You Grinch," she grinned.

Her glance swam to the bald fingerlike branches of trees in the distance, at the grey sky beyond them, unseeing. Her father had to be so lonely now. She knew how important it was for him, ever since they went apart with her mother, her father made sure everything went perfect this particular evening, that and Christmas. Maybe it was a subconscious notion to substitute his wife, or he was afraid that she might decide to celebrate with her mother instead, Lisa couldn't decide, but she as well always made sure her father would see how much she appreciated his efforts.

"I always loved Thanksgiving," she commented. Her smile was distant, tinted with melancholy. "Greg and I- Greg's my brother… oh, of course, you know it…"

Her gaze dropped as if realizing only now who she was talking to.

Rippner didn't want to tell her he knew even more. He knew for instance that her brother, who was five years older than her, ran a bakery in New Jersey, owned a gorgeous Ducati Monster he loved fumbling with, had a pretty but quite shallow ditz for a wife who without doubt had been a cheerleader in high school. She was as far from Lisa's personality- the Lisa he knew now, because, he was almost sure, the Lisa prior to the parking lot was probably closer to her sister-in-law in lifestyle and way of thinking- as it gets. He also knew that during the two months he was following her, Lisa had talked to her brother only once on the phone. Probably they weren't in the best terms with each other, and it had instantly ruled him out as a possible mean in forcing her make the call.

"We used to help Dad with the turkey. He commented on the process like it was some kind of a sports event, wrestling or something. It was morbid, those commentaries, now that I think of it, but so funny," her smile wavered. "I miss those times."

"Why did they divorce after so many years? Why then?"

She shrugged, and drained the remainder of the mulled wine. If he moved closer, he could still smell the spices around her. The wine gave a soft flush to her cheeks, a deep red tint to her lips; she'd never been the heavy drinker type.

"Disagreements. First it was Greg who moved out. Then after I finished college and started to skim through the rent ads, I think they realized they would be left alone in that huge house, together with their conflicts. So before I could even move out, the divorce was decided and over. Thank God, it wasn't ugly."

After a long silence that he spent with watching her closely, Rippner remarked. "And you blame yourself for it, don't you? For the divorce."

Her head perked, and her gaze fluttered to meet his briefly before returning to her empty cup.

"I… no, it's…" she stammered. After a long intake of air, she breathed: "I know it's not my fault."

"True. And still, you behave like it was."

"If I haven't thought of moving out, maybe they would still…"

"Fight all day," he finished matter-of-factly, cutting in her words. "Bullshit. And you know that. Don't do this, Lisa. Don't blame yourself for things that are not your fault. Things you could do nothing to prevent. There's enough to be blamed for."

"I know," she said softly, avoiding his gaze.

"Have you considered it from another aspect? They'd have divorced long before they actually did if it weren't for you. Disagreements would've made them eat each other alive eventually."

"You're right. I know." In the ensuing silence a strange calmness came over her, and suddenly she was grateful for his presence there, grateful for the fact that he knew her so much. She lifted her head with a faint smile, and their gazes locked. All she saw in his clear blue eyes was gentleness, and that moment he looked beautiful to her, unearthly, achingly, impossibly so. "Thanks."

Solemnly, he nodded. "You're welcome."

Lisa looked at his hand on the rail, and thought how much she wanted to hold it now. Her eyes trailed the rough patch of skin that stained its smoothness where the Rottweiler had bit him. _Will it ever disappear?_ she mused. He stood so close now that she could feel the hot puffs of his breath on her temple. His chest brushed up against her shoulder, and she straightened out, not moving away but rather meeting him. Neither of them budged, completely satisfied with the posture. The sun had long set, but the blanket of snow made the place light. The snow started to fall with anew intensity, all colors of snowflakes whirling around them as the streetlamps and holiday lights painted them with million tones. Lisa smiled at the scenery; she could have watched it for hours. It was so different from the boiling climate of Miami.

"Your brother. You two are not so close, right?" he asked suddenly.

"We are." Lisa shook her head, her expression betrayed hurt that probably wasn't addressed to him. "Were. Why you ask?"

"I don't know." He narrowed his eyes. For a moment halted like he was contemplating something before finally asking: "Does he know about the scar?"

Lisa groaned. "Jackson, please, not this again."

"He doesn't, does he?" he pushed on, ignoring her protest. Her silence told him all. "Why?"

She buried her face in her palms for a moment before sliding them down to cover her mouth. Her eyes gained a deeper green shade in the meager light and in the flood of her emotions as she stared ahead. There was a steam of a sigh levitating around her face before evaporating in the snowfall.

"I don't know. First I wanted to, really. When it happened, he was on his honeymoon. When he returned, he was so happy, I just didn't have the heart to tell him then. And after a while, it would've sounded strange, wouldn't it? 'Hey, Greg, something happened to me a year ago.' It wouldn't have changed anything anyway. No use in making him worried."

"Lisa."

It was more like a groan. And he didn't say anything more, just her name with an intonation that betrayed his incredulity. But there was no need for more. It was incredible, ridiculous that she'd been worried for her brother's happiness when her life had just turned upside down, fallen in the deepest pit of hell. Always the people pleaser, always thinking of others first, always ready to sacrifice herself. So unselfish. They were the exact opposite. Complementary colors for each other. Yin and his yang. A full circle. And maybe, only maybe, they were incomplete without the other.

He didn't really see what made him be her personal shrink, why he deemed it so important that she saw what she was screwing up in her life. Perhaps it annoyed him that she was blind to things that were clear as daylight; maybe he wanted to change her view so he could see his own imprints on her, to see the mark of his chisel – and it would make her his creation in a way, and he could take delight in her like a modern times Pygmalion in his perfect statue.

Lisa crushed the cup into a mess of plastic. He was, of course, right again. The first time she got the chance, she would tell Greg everything, she decided. She missed him, and now she could see how her secret distanced her from him. Greg had tried to repair many times whatever had gone wrong between them, but it depended more on her than him.

Rippner watched Lisa silently as she walked up to a trash bin and discarded the cup. When she returned, it seemed like she pulled closer to him. Or maybe it was only a wish.

The fact that she hadn't told anyone but her parents about the rape set him thinking. Or rather, the fact that _beside_ her parents she shared it with only one person: him. It was nothing if not strange and ironic. Nevertheless, it left him oddly proud.

"You didn't tell your own brother. Why did you tell me then?"

She hugged herself, trying to hide her face behind the scarf, and watched a snowflake swirl around and land on her arm. She had an alien feeling thinking back at the time on the plane, at her own memories and motives. At him. the whole horrible plot. She looked up at him, her eyes searching for the scar at the base of his throat. Recalling the moment she'd struck him right after revealing her secret was alien, too, hazy like it was nothing but a bad dream. For the first time ever since they'd met again, Lisa knew for certain that she would never be able to do that to him again.

When she spoke, her voice felt coming from the bottom of a deep well to her ear. "I wanted you to see why you had the wrong girl. Why you had it coming. And probably I just wanted to remind myself of my own oath."

Well, maybe it wasn't what he'd wanted to hear; not that it was clear what exactly he'd expected. Rippner let out a humorless bark of laughter. More like a snort. Yeah, he definitely got the wrong girl for the job. But for other aspects, he wasn't so sure. She managed to overwrite, or if not, then no less than make him doubt his own view of himself and his place in the world, a whole batch of his deep-rooted opinions and thoughts, and erased every single woman he'd ever met from his mind. Not that it was a good thing, no, but something he couldn't leave unmentioned. There weren't too many people who'd been able to achieve this in his life, and that appointed her someone of distinction.

He was thinking of one particular memory way too often these days. He remembered the look she'd given him while he was bleeding away on her floor in the wailing sirens of approaching police cars. He remembered the look- astonished, shocked, respectful- he'd surely had in his eyes, unconcealed and raw in the insurmountable pain that smashed his defenses and will to maintain a front into million pieces, and beaten and shot and stabbed, it was leaking with his blood: the look of regret. It matched hers- not the pitiful half but the other-, it matched the theoretical question floating between them, the question he always hated so much: what if. What would have happened if-? What they could have been if-? If not. It was all in her eyes. It was all in his, too. He wondered if it'd ever be there again, that bud of thought.

Light wind rose, it stirred the white fluff around them. Lisa watched a snowflake land on his eyelashes, balance there and melt, a pearly bead, stealing the blue from his eyes, then a glimmering tremble, and it dropped on his cheek. She followed its trail and felt her heart swell and unfold like a flower, like a rain cloud, and she understood the unsettling truth without analyzing and comparing and reflecting that somewhere along the line, she'd fallen in love with him.

It was such a mundane moment. Such an unexpected revelation, and it had come without foreboding.

She was thunderstruck. Shaken to the core. It felt like overhearing a conversation between her mind and heart, eavesdropping on a secret that had been kept from her so far.

The world died down, quieted into low humming. Even faded a bit from bluish white to uninteresting grey. It was a horrible shock to her system, the discovery, rendering her motionless, clearing her mind of all thoughts. It was like trying to stand straight during an earthquake. Her whole being seemed to quiver as her heart drummed with irregular, heavy beats, so heavy like it'd turned into stone and jostled around uncontrollably. And suddenly, now that it finally had a name- _love_-, all those symptoms that'd left her puzzled in the previous days, all the unexplainable inner drives she hadn't been able to originate came back with full force, hand in hand, multiplied, crushing her with their weight, and she fully understood the impact, the gravity of it. The tragedy in loving someone like him. Loving him of all people.

She was yet to process this trifling little word that managed to make everything go haywire. The connection of the word with him.

_I'm in love,_ she probed the words, tasted them. They didn't seem to belong to her. They were like stolen treasures she had found guilty delight in watching. Nothing made any sense anymore. _Where to go from here?_ She couldn't see her path anymore. In the birth of this one feeling, in the desperate cry of her rational side that it shouldn't have happened this way, none of it, everything that'd been obvious and simple turned upside down, inside out.

A string of questions started to play in her head like an old vinyl disc with a stuck stylus in its groove, over and over again, and it dazed her. _How could it happen? Was there a point where it still could have been stopped? How could you let it happen?_

She had no answers to these questions. There was no sense in giving a reply anyway. What's done cannot be undone – and the simple phrase left her miserable. Life had a cruel sense of humor, and its newest irony became the most twisted drama in her life. It was just fitting that it ended up being yet another secret she had to keep forever unsaid: falling in love with the wrong man. She felt suddenly painfully lonely at the thought. It was her cross to bear, and no one had to know about it. There was no one, anyway, who she would, who she _could_ tell it to without them wanting to lock her up in a psychiatric ward. Probably she really belonged there. Maybe she deserved this. Maybe it was the punishment for trusting him, letting him make her forget who he was, for the difficulty she recently found in connecting him to the man on the plane – all in her heart, only her heart: her mind remembered everything, but was pushed aside in the emotional tempest her heart had lately created. She was, all in all, inexperienced in this territory after the complete lack of emotional life in the past two years, and he'd sneaked past her walls. He'd be laughing at her, if he knew, being all triumphant and cocky and tactless, about that she had no doubt.

Maybe it had been predestined from the very beginning, Lisa mused, starting the moment she had returned his gaze back in the check-in line on a day that had faded in the onrush of her new experiences with him; predestined maybe even when she'd declined his invitation to the airport bar: the kneejerk reflexes had done that, and that was the first time in a long period when she regretted refusing a man – maybe she'd been able to sense it, the unsettling, unexplainable sync they'd gain, the counterbalance they'd pose for each other: the two extremes of the same line, and maybe the line curled into a circle sometimes and, in their essence, the two extremes became the same. And still, the emotional journey she'd gone through from the bar to this snowy market couldn't be longer. Compared to the now-and-then, her attraction back then seemed shallow and flat. The present was everything but.

Contradictory feelings assaulted her: beyond her misery, despite everything, she couldn't deny the sparkle of excitement in her chest that managed to aggravate her misery. Lisa felt betrayed. Suddenly she felt like crying because she knew it'd change everything. Her gaze dropped. She watched her own shoes covered with snow, amazed that they were there though she couldn't feel them. She didn't dare look at him. Not with the encompassing realization in her eyes.

Rippner studied her intensely with his usual enthusiasm. The moment was off-putting. Probably for the first time in their history, he couldn't unravel the expression crossing her face. Usually, he never had trouble in reading women, to know what they wanted; with Lisa he was confused, he couldn't explain her glances. Maybe the reason for it was that she herself didn't know what she really wanted. She looked so far away now that he felt the urge to pull her back from the distance he could not follow her into. He reached out, and stroked her cheek with his thumb.

Lisa lifted her head and her gaze swept across his face.

She froze. He froze. The tiny snowflakes froze with the moment.

She eyed him silently, something warm and aching spreading within her: a wistful, sinful wish. She didn't dare to move. Neither did he.

"A snowflake," he explained softly.

Lisa nodded, watching him moisten his lips, and she closed her eyes because it was too much to take. Because she realized she would not be able to look at him the same way ever again.

"I'm getting cold," she whispered, though she was anything but. The moment was too overwhelming, and she had the strange notion that if she stayed too long, she'd be forever nailed to the very spot by the mere weight of her emotions.

He didn't argue, didn't ask anything and for that she was grateful, but Lisa almost started as Rippner reached out and took her hand, squeezed her numb fingers between his palms, just like her father did when she was a child. His touch was emblazing. Lisa shuddered, and slipped her other hand in his, too, feeling rather than hearing him chuckle.

"Okay, let's go back then."

Her hands were so small, so delicate, just like she was. Under the very comfortable pretext of warming it, Rippner kept her right hand in his as they sauntered across the square, and smiled to himself as she didn't pull away. It was a full touch, palm to palm, not just the meek one she would give him, the soft fingertip-probes that were more like questions against his skin. At the crosswalk they halted, and he stole a glance at the shop window just beside them, watching their dim reflection in the glass. They looked like a couple, holding hands, just on their way back to home. They looked good together, right, even. He wanted to preserve the feel, the _fact_ of their hands touching, her wrist against his; this image, even if it wasn't more than a façade, the projection of his pathetic fantasies, and suddenly with a pang of ache, he wanted it to be real, not only a front. He wanted to know how it'd be if it was real.

The walk back to their hotel was permeated with heavy silence. Lisa wasn't even sure if she could maintain the usual tone with him, her voice sounded too treacherous to her ears.

As they entered their room, Lisa had to face a newfound doubt as they were going about their same routine, bustling about the room and bathroom, around the beds and their luggage with Lisa constantly dancing out of his way. _How will I be able to stay in the same space with him for three more days? _She couldn't even bring herself to meet his gaze because she was afraid he might read her feelings – after all, he knew her too much.

They settled on the couch with the take-away food they'd picked up on their way back. Rippner found it mildly amusing, their little fucked-up Thanksgiving with paper boxes and plastic cutlery.

"Hope you don't want me to hold your hand and pray. Or is there something you wanna say thanks for?" he squinted at her. Lisa lifted a haughty eyebrow, a goading glint lighting her eyes.

"My old hockey stick in the closet?"

"Now _that_ was insensible."

"I could've mentioned far worse objects," she looked pointedly at his neck, and he was surprised to discover the lack of anger her insolent, teasing words failed to evoke. "Now, your dime."

He touched the fork to his chin with playful pondering. "Thanks for not aiming at fatal body parts?"

Lisa shook her head. It couldn't be getting any more absurd; it was always like this with him, wicked, twisted, but strange enough, their smirks never failed to match.

Was it now, instead of thanksgiving, actually forgiving?

The idea was somehow formidable for her.

It wasn't right this way. Nothing made any sense anymore; she lost the meaning behind words, simple words, important words like good and bad, black and white. In the moment of confusion, under the crushing weight of her personal Apocalypse, the framework of her steely morality collapsed, and Lisa feared that she'd lost the moral code she was always so unyielding about. There wasn't enough room for the two within her: the moral code and her feelings for him. Nothing was right this way.

After finishing their less than traditional dinner, they opted for watching a movie but maybe simply to fill the silence permeating the room.

Rippner couldn't help but notice the rigid way Lisa was sitting next to him – not even next, now that he thought, rather putting a convenient foot-long distance between them. From the corner of his eyes, he watched her profile, the closed posture she was reclined in, and he remembered how it felt having her head against his shoulder.

Lisa couldn't have told what the movie was about for the life of her. It didn't have a chance to hold her attention. There was a funny scene in the movie she sensed beyond the periphery of her awareness in delay, and Lisa discovered neither of them laughed. She was sure, if she had the strength to turn her head and look at him, she would find the same detached look on his face as she had on hers.

As if realizing the same, Rippner suddenly reached for the remote and switched off the TV.

"You're gonna hate me," he glanced at her with an apologetic look, "but I need to remove your stitches. It won't hurt that much, I promise."

Lisa couldn't care less, not now. The skin around her wound felt constricted but she'd gotten used to it over the past two weeks. Obediently, she left the couch and sat on the bed where he was granted with better light and more space. But then, she was faced with an inconvenient problem.

"You have to remove your shirt, Leese," Rippner smirked, spreading the items he brought from the bathroom on the sheet beside her.

Lisa watched numbly as he sat on the bed, lifting his eyes to meet hers with a teasingly urging smile.

"You're not shy, aren't you?"

Of course she was. Especially now. Lisa felt the heat rise to her face, and tried to turn away as much she could without being too obvious about her intention. She could feel his smirk, his unwavering gaze burning a spot right at the nape of her neck. A memory sprung in her mind, a memory of him planting a kiss on that very spot, and a wave of hot flush coursed through her belly. She started to unbutton her shirt but stopped at her belly, and pulled the right half off her shoulder. It stuck at her elbow as she was simultaneously trying to use it as a cover and remove it. Fixating on her knees, she couldn't see the amused look crossing his face. Rippner picked up the small scissors, then dropped it back with a theatrical sigh.

"Unless you want your shirt to get all bloody, I suggest you remove it properly."

Her head snapped up, and she shot him a glare. And realized he was right.

Rippner was grinning. "Should I promise I won't look?"

"If you were a gentleman, you wouldn't even ask the question," she mumbled, increasingly aware how close he was. How unconcealed his look was. She undid the remaining buttons, and slipped her right arm out of the shirt.

His breath left a tingling spot on her shoulder blade as he whispered, not really hiding his amusement. "It'd help my job if you didn't show your back to me."

Lisa hadn't realized that on some point she'd turned completely away from him. Pulling at the loose lapel of the shirt to cover as much of her right breast as she could, Lisa moved back to her previous spot. Her heart was beating so rapidly that it almost hurt, and she clutched the shirt in her fist for support. She couldn't find the courage to look up at him. All she could see was his hand fallen upon his tools. Her head was reeling, but she had the inkling that it had nothing to do with the small impromptu surgery, more with the anticipation that in a moment, he would touch her bare skin. His proximity clouded her senses. Right then, it was the best anesthetic she could wish for.

"Okay," he breathed. His fingers undecidedly danced between the scissors and the small metal tweezers, but his eyes weren't following them.

He didn't want to stare, he really didn't. Not out of chivalry, more for the sake of his sanity and cool.

But it was Pandora's box, and the box sat half ajar.

And here she was sitting, inches from him, with half her back and shoulders exposed; if he moved just a breath closer, he'd be able to inhale her scent, feel the warmth her skin was radiating – no sooner the thought crept in his mind, he found himself leaning toward her, and he stopped. It was already too much. In the soft light of the lamps scattered around the room, her skin shone with a smooth, light glow. Her hair cast a shadow over the perfect curve of her clavicle, the soft crease beside her shoulder blade. His eyes roamed the tantalizingly small part of skin she let him see, followed the upper rim of her right breast where her fist pressed against it, revealing the plain edge of her bra. He felt dizzy in the sudden rush of arousal and the insane circulation of blood, and had to close his eyes as his sight became blurry. With increasing annoyance, he realized he was breathless, too.

Then his gaze fell upon her fist once again, the rigid posture she'd picked up, the vague mark of her worst nightmare over her breast, and he suddenly sobered. Reaching out, he turned her head toward him. Her eyes shone feverishly.

"You're not afraid of me, are you?" If anything, it came out rather intimidating.

Lisa knew he didn't mean it that way. She knew exactly what he meant. Her fist squeezed against the scar on its own volition, almost painfully crushing her chest. She couldn't help it; the motion was years old, deep-rooted.

It didn't escape his attention. His eyebrows lowered, pulling a dark edge over his gaze. His hand moved against her cheek delicately, yet its mere presence was unnerving. Distracted by the fleeting touch of his thumb brushing the corner of her lips, Lisa could only shake her head.

"I wouldn't… you know that, right?"

His eyes glimmered in the diffused light. They looked serious now, grave with the impending darkness lurking behind them if she gave the wrong answer.

"I know," Lisa whispered. It wasn't hard, it was the truth, and for a minute she wondered how he could even think otherwise.

Rippner nodded. "Good." His smile was warm. A bit relieved, too.

Lisa couldn't turn away, enticed by the glance he was giving her. He was so close that she could have counted his eyelashes, the blue dots around his pupils. With a sudden jolt of surprise, Lisa realized she was leaning against his shoulder, if only slightly so. She felt extremely stupid. How could he have such an overpowering effect on her? She retreated reluctantly.

He did so, too.

"You'll feel way better afterwards," Rippner added soothingly as he examined her wound, the three stitches marring her skin. His fingertips slid along them with feather-like gentleness. A ripple of goosebumps flooded her skin, and she had to hold back a shudder rising from her chest. She abandoned herself to the feeling his fingertips created skimming along her skin, her focus all on his touch, on his scent floating around her.

She twitched as he removed the first stitch. He'd been right: it did hurt, but not too much. His free hand flew up to her hair, stroked it and slid down her back comfortingly, lightly grazing her bare skin, leaving long lines that seemed to be on fire.

"I'm sorry. Feel okay?"

Dazed, Lisa managed. "It's fine."

She steeled her body when he tore the next one. "Just one more," he whispered softly.

When he was done, he wiped off the thin streak of blood, cleaned the skin and neatly wrapped her arm with a patch of gauze.

"As good as new," he smiled. "Let me help," he added as she turned to slip back in her shirt. He moved the fabric gently up her arm, minding the wound – mourning that she was about to hide herself from him again. He fought the temptation to lay his head on her shoulder, glide his lips, his tongue along its curve. It was getting more and more difficult to keep a safe distance from her when his body was craving for her proximity, for the jolts of excitement igniting his nerve endings. He hadn't felt such longing for someone in a very long time. If ever, actually.

"You okay?" he asked. She'd been awfully quiet ever since their return to the hotel and it bothered him.

Her eyes fluttered to his face briefly, her fingers running up quickly along the buttons, and she breathed. "Yes."

Rippner watched her smooth the wrinkles of her clothes. She showed her back to him again, and he scowled at the back of her head.

"You know, there was no need to hide it from me so fiercely. It's not that I haven't seen it yet."

In mild confusion, her gaze met his. "Hide what?"

"The scar. Or are you hiding it from yourself?"

She didn't answer. Her arms coiled around her torso as a physical symbol of seclusion. He hated it, that she tried to shield herself from him.

"I wonder what you're planning to say about it to future Mr. Right. Or is that why you reject every man?" He exhaled with an incredulous huff. "You behave like it was a big deal."

"What?" Lisa exclaimed harshly, eyes blazing with anger. She swirled fully toward him. Her hands balled into fists as she glared at him through the revival of her old temper. "Not a big deal?"

Rippner rolled his eyes, mildly amused to see her so pissed. "You know I didn't mean it that way."

"No, I don't know! You think you can explain it?"

"I meant the damn scar. That it's no big deal that you have one."

"Oh, it's really not," she drawled ironically. Her face puckered with the fiery sparkles of ire. "What do you think, _future Mr. Right_ would take it lightly and not see me-?" she bit the end of the sentence, her lips a thin white line.

"The damaged goods you are?" Rippner guessed cruelly. "If you're damaged somewhere, it's here," he poked her forehead. His hand dropped and his forefinger jabbed her right above her heart. "And here."

Lisa took a defensive step back, flinching at his words and his sudden touch within her intimate space.

"In all honesty, wouldn't you think the same thing?"

"I wouldn't give a fuck, Lisa!" he snorted scornfully.

"Uh-huh."

"I _don't_ give a fuck!" he claimed heatedly, almost with disbelief. She was just perfect. Scar or no scar. Who in their right mind would _not_ want her just because of it? She was out of her fucking mind.

Lisa blinked at him, clearly trying to come up with a good enough argument point. Her eyes twinkled in a strange way. "Because you're abnormal. And… and demented."

"Huh, thanks. And you are delusional if you think it matters."

Sullenly, Lisa stood huddled. "Of course it does. Not that anyone could be blamed. It's disgusting."

He couldn't help it, the anger that washed over him. He tried to keep his voice low and calm and detached, but as the first words came rushing out of his mouth, he knew it was a battle he'd lost.

"You know what's disgusting? The way it got there! And it's a shame that it spoiled your-" Your perfection. It almost slipped. "But you're _not_ your scar, Lisa! The problem isn't with the scar but with your pretty little head because this is the first thing you see when you look into the mirror, right? You see it as a price tag? Something that determines your value? You associate yourself with it? Like you two are the same?"

Lisa took another step back like he had just hit her. Her eyes grew wide as she stared at him in shock.

Venomously, not really caring that tears of hurt were flooding her eyes, Rippner ranted on. His voice rose, rattling hollowly. "You see it huge, blaring red, right? Ever growing? Does it even seem to bleed sometimes, Leese?" She had an expression that told him he'd just scored a bull's-eye. He clutched his own hair in exasperation. "Jesus. And you're calling _me_ demented and abnormal?"

A bitter, half-strangled sob erupted from her chest as if her heart had just broken. He could be so utterly cruel. And so cruelly spot-on. She couldn't believe that with every single word he could make her hate him and love him at the same time, love him more and more just because he _saw_ her. It was such a shame that she wasn't able to inflict the same effect on him. Such a shame they could never be anything more.

Rippner exhaled loudly. She was doing it again: transforming his rage back into coolness, making him all puzzled at his own outburst. Like a few tears were able to put out the blazing flames of anger. And no doubt, she could do it just as easily the other way around anytime.

"Don't cry." He grunted in a slightly placatory tone. "I hate it."

In sharp contrast with his words, he reached out and pulled her to him, gently forcing her head against his shoulder.

Lisa stiffened, now sharply aware of how it felt to be in his embrace, suddenly overly self-conscious in his proximity. Through his shirt, she could sense how hot his skin was, how sinewy and fine-toned his muscles were in the side of his torso, and she could feel her face redden. Her fingers crept up his back, chastely following the wrinkles of his shirt, and Lisa pressed her forehead to the side of his neck. She felt as though she had fever.

Both of them pretended that this level of physical contact was completely normal and within the range of their half-business relationship, that it had no sexual undertone.

His arms settled around her shoulders with a comforting yet awkward pat, and Lisa felt as though her heart would split in two any minute in its overwhelming desire and sorrow. He was nothing but kind- kind right after crushing her into smithereens, that is-, unaware what a horrible war it evoked in her. She was sure he had no idea that he was pushing her into agony by simply being gentle, being so airy and easy about their nearness. It meant nothing to him, she knew, but to her, it was the only lifeline she cared to reach for and keep.

"Why are you doing this? Always. What do you want with it?" she forced out, swallowing her chokes. She seemingly referred to his harsh verbal attack but actually meant his unpredictability that swung like a pendulum from one extreme to the other, and in its vacillation never failed to bash her.

"I don't know," he admitted honestly. She buried her face in his chest, clung onto him with her arms around his waist. "I swear I don't know," he muttered into her hair, and she nestled even closer.

"Stop being my personal Dr. Phil," she sniffed, whispering against his heart with a weak smile.

"I hope I'm not that cheap."

She chuckled softly. Her hands went on their own routes, gliding up on his back, then down on his spine, delicately palpating the fibers of muscles. It was a full embrace, a real hug, and she wanted to forget everything, just savor the feeling, his warmth and scent and the curves of his body. Being hugged by a man who wasn't her father; she'd missed it so much.

Rippner froze to the spot, completely dumbstruck. She was again the ignorant little leech; what the hell did she take him for? Her personal emotional trash can? That and, yes, definitely her human-sized Teddy bear she could hug and cry her problems into. It was crazy, and absolutely ridiculous. Rippner closed his eyes, pressed them shut in the attempt to keep his desire at bay. He was painfully aware of her hands sliding to the small of his back, stroking him through the shirt which felt too thin now, way too thin; every absent circle her fingers drew on him afflicted pleasure and pain in his loins. His whole body was quivering with electric want. She stirred, her light breath tickled the skin of his chest even through the clothes. She brushed up against him, her breasts softly pressing against his ribs, thighs against thighs, hips to hips, and with a sudden- the _last_- jolt of sobriety, he pushed himself away.

"It's late," he mumbled. Whether the time or _their_ time, he didn't bother to determine.

Her eyes, forlorn and haunted now, followed him to the bathroom. She stared at the door for long minutes even after he'd disappeared behind it. Torn so abruptly from his arms, the room felt cold and unwelcoming.

If only she could get rid of her feelings for him. If only there was a method to do so.

She was haggling with her heart, trying to argue her points, to convince herself with rational reasoning- oh, he would've been so proud of her hearing that-, but it wasn't a bargain. It wasn't anything negotiable.

_Four days_, she told herself,_ and I will never see him again._

Her heart almost spilled out at the words. Maybe her mind meant it a consolation, a reminder that soon she would get her normal life back and this unlikely journey would be over. Maybe.

All she felt, though, was infinite grief.

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**A/N**: Okay *nervous* Whatever you think, let it be good or bad, let me know. I might learn from it and do it better next time. Thanks:)


	14. Ecce homo

**A/N: **Sorry I made you wait so long, I'm dealing with quite a lot real-life and writer issues as well.  
Funfact: Ecce homo (=Here is the man), both in title and characterization, is the twin of chapter 2 (Ecce diabolus=Here is the devil).  
Evelyn, a big thanks again! Dear readers, thanks for sticking with this story.

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**Chapter 14: Ecce homo**

The next three days- their _last_ three days, as his mind, like a malicious vulture, never failed to remind him- were marked by Lisa's newborn and sudden tendency to distance herself from him both physically and emotionally, and Rippner was rattled in a way he'd have never expected. Whenever he touched her, let it be accidental or deliberate- the latter more and more often-, she either flinched or froze completely. Ever since they'd left Wisconsin, she retired behind her shields. It wasn't that she was angry with him, about that he was sure. She was willing to talk to him in a diplomatically demure and timid way that drove him absolutely mad. He certainly didn't welcome her anew inhibitions and uncertainty, and if nothing else, it left him aghast as to what could possibly cause it.

There was no denying, though, that he missed it: the old comfort between them, her increasingly docile- and still annoyingly independent- behavior. The endless talks with Lisa starting a sentence and him finishing it. The lazy look of ease she would give him. Something was troubling her, and he had no idea whatsoever about its nature and origin.

Maybe she was counting back the days.

He surely was.

Somewhere beyond the all-engulfing irritation, he sensed it was for the best; in his mind he knew he shouldn't chase what they built and left at Duke's. Just a chapter in an impossible and unreal story. Alice in Wonderland where not only Wonderland was unreal but Alice too. They were. The way they behaved. There was no sense in it, and he always strived to avoid doing senseless things. They had no future: he was to go off to the left and Lisa to the right. This is how he always planned it, how it should happen. Left and right. Anything else was beyond logic and rationality.

He had to focus on the task ahead, and nothing else, but hour by hour, day by day, he turned grimmer as Monday was drawing closer. Keefe had finished his Pacific tour in San Francisco on Friday, and now was back again in Washington.

They reached Maryland early afternoon on Sunday, and a little after sunset they checked in a stuffy motel near where I-70 leading to Baltimore met I-270 towards Washington. This one, too, was one of those last things, last motel, last night together; the last time he would wake up beside her. Rippner wanted to kick himself for the row of melodramatic inward remarks.

After settling in their room, they left their suitcases unpacked, walked back down to the lobby and out to the parking lot. There was a small restaurant a hundred yards down the street, and they approached it without hurry. The air was very crisp, heavy with the threat of a snowstorm, and the narrow sidewalk was covered with patches of thin ice that couldn't entirely melt during the day and grew thicker during the night.

The restaurant was dimly lit with small lamps on each round table, pouring warmth from under tattered old shades. The stripy wallpaper, mint-green curtains and framed sepia photographs gave the place a bit cheap but certainly nostalgic charm; like a set from a '20s gangster movie where mysterious, darkly attractive Mafiosi in pin-striped suits would take their beloved in knee-long dresses topped with cloche hats on a date in the peak of Prohibition. Lisa smiled to herself. She definitely had her own mysterious and darkly attractive companion, if not a mafia member – as it seemed those were the fossils of the past, clearly lagging behind in the unofficial contest of financially attractive illegal jobs: the new age was for high-profile assassins.

She sank down heavily at one of the tables in the back of the restaurant. It was nothing if not horribly morbid that she could think of it so lightly.

Their food was served fairly quickly, and they ate it in relative silence.

It had no taste but it wasn't necessarily the fault of their meal. The future beyond next day was not only obscure but somewhat dreaded too, and it dulled everything they touched.

Above the small lamp, Lisa stole a glance at Rippner, and was met with his gaze, as much stealthy as hers. Self-consciously, against her own wish, Lisa turned away. She had the strange notion that his gaze could penetrate her, and like a searchlight, creep closer to her secret with each minute she maintained the glance. She hated herself for it: for her feelings for him, for not being able to look at him fully anymore – and in fact, what she really regretted wasn't the former. Somehow it made the burden she had to carry even heavier.

They finished at the same time, just like they usually did, subconsciously adjusting to the other's daily biological rhythm like in a perfect symbiosis. She sat with her back straight as Rippner reclined against the back of the plush headrest of the chair. Their knees touched under the table, shin against shin as he stretched his legs, and she didn't pull away. If anything, she moved closer. Her chest constructed with grief, suddenly too tight to contain the longing, alive and hungry, never asleep, in her heart. This could have been real, in another world, the cozy little restaurant, an intimate dinner with a man on the other side of the table, a man she was able to touch, she _wanted_ to touch. She hadn't felt this way for years. In the eradication of her old life she somehow ended up believing she would never be able to feel such yearning for a man that could easily overwrite every single reason and fear she'd built into the walls of her mental and physical abstinence. It was just so typical, so ironic, that it had to be someone she should hate, fear and very much avoid. Someone she wouldn't see again. Someone who didn't reciprocate because, Lisa reckoned, and he also had confirmed it, wasn't able for anything she expected from him, from someone evoking such emotions in her. Wasn't able for anything beyond his misguided philosophy along the line 'I know you, I own you': his obsessive interest in her life- meant to eliminate the risk factor, the unknown in the equation, by far not being based on emotions- was the natural consequence and means ruled by his inner drive for control. The same control she eventually took back from him.

She frowned, a recent memory assailing her mind. Maybe he was never really in control, in the first place. Never on the top of his unquestionably steady confidence.

She waited patiently for him to ask for the bill. Then to pay. Waited as he gulped down his drink. Waited for her rapidly hammering heart to get out of the way of her words.

_There's nothing to lose_, she told herself and let her eyes overhaul his features languorously, wholly, his hand, strong and manly and warm, she remembered how warm, how soft- how ruthlessly strong-, on the tabletop, _nothing you haven't already lost_.

_Nothing you ever had at all._

"Jackson."

He looked up, frowning slightly at the finality in her eyes. This was the first time in the last few days she fully returned his gaze, he realized, and at the thought, his body leant forward on its own volition, absorbing the determined yet bashful glint of her eyes.

"This will be a question I don't like," he smirked. "On second thought, a lot of questions I won't like."

She smiled but only faintly, her mind preoccupied with collecting the proper words. "The times while you were watching me, did you have a dangerous affair?"

Rippner was clearly taken aback. "What?"

"Were you in a relationship?"

"If by relationship you mean the orthodox way, then no. I told you I'm not cut out for that."

For a long moment Lisa was giving him a taste of his own medicine by looking at him intensely, pryingly. It smuggled a smile on his face, an amused one, full of anticipation.

"Why did you fight with your friend, Michele? Why did you hit him?"

The smile dropped. "How-?"

Somewhat smugly, Lisa announced. "I have my own sources."

It didn't take him long to find the answer to his own unfinished question. A dark frown descended on his forehead, and to her sinful satisfaction, he appeared clearly discomforted.

"Giovanna…."

As he looked away to the side, fixating a point somewhere on the floor beside her, Lisa knew he was very likely rewinding his memories back to that event, pondering what Giovanna could possibly share with her that he wouldn't approve. He didn't seem to elaborate, just like Lisa had expected, so she pressed on nonetheless. It's not like she'd have a second chance as things stood.

"Why did he accuse you with not being objective anymore and endangering the assignment?"

"Ask him."

"I'm asking you." Emboldened, Lisa chanced. "Were you talking about me?"

"You? Come on," Rippner jeered. His eyes glinted in the diffused lighting as he shifted in the chair. "Nope. About the job."

"That time wasn't it the same?"

_That time_. Was there such time at all when the two were the same? Perhaps for two weeks in the very beginning. Rippner stared at her, at the superiorly raised perfect eyebrows, the smart, sharp green eyes, and suddenly he understood there was no elegant way out of this. It didn't mean he wouldn't try, though. Dismissively, with a tone he hoped conveyed concentrated indifference, he remarked. "It happens sometimes. When you spend extensively long time with the same assignment, you start to get lost in the details, lose focus."

"It didn't have anything to do with a woman?"

"Excuse me?"

Lisa leant closer above the small lamp, and Rippner found himself struggle not to retreat into safe distance, unnerved by the cruelly clear-sighted gleam on her face. Her gaze didn't falter, and Rippner sensed the determination behind her whole posture. He sensed a wispy despair, too, that he was sure Lisa wasn't even aware of.

Lisa cocked her head to the side, probing the words on her lips. Even the suggestion she was about to utter made her flush in sudden timidity.

"Why did he say then that you shouldn't follow… your physical needs?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

Lisa smirked wryly. "Oh but you do."

"Stop this. It doesn't look good on you." He stood abruptly.

"How hypocritical of you to say that just because you're on the receiving end of it!"

Lisa stood too, as he, not bothering with a comeback, dashed towards the entrance with angry strides. Outside, she fell in line with him with some difficulty, hopping across a smudge of ice on the pavement in the last second.

"Jackson. Why can't you answer me?"

"You don't want to know the answer."

"It's for me to decide. And I wouldn't ask you."

Flatly, he scoffed. "Mind your own business."

"What was it about? What happened back then? Why can't you just be a notch more open to me?" she exclaimed, not even sure anymore why exactly she was persuading this particular topic. His steely resistance stirred something up in her guts, an instinct maybe. It was like bait for a hunting dog.

Thrusting his hands in his pants pockets, Rippner snapped testily. "You don't understand anything. Anything."

"Then explain it to me. I might surprise you."

"The fuck you would."

"Give me a little credit, will you?"

He laughed; cold, crispy laughter, devoid of humor, full of tautness. His steps faltered. He skirted a frozen pond. Shook his head incredulously, stared up at the darkened sky, not really seeing beyond the embarrassing memories of that summer. She was calling fate against her and didn't even seem to catch it wasn't a funny game anymore. He could crush her newfound bravery with a single word of the truth, bring back good old hatred and repulsion. Was that what she wanted? Because it sure as hell was not what _he_ did.

"This is how you always get into trouble. You had it coming, you know."

"I'm not that easily scared, so cut this ominous speech."

Lisa grabbed his elbow and pulled him back, so he was forced to make a half-turn toward her. Here, beyond the range of the nearby lampposts, they stood in relative darkness, their features accentuated by deep contrast from the background light. The orange hue smeared a vivid glow around his hair, emphasized the perfectly cut lines of his cheekbones, the well just below his lips. Her gaze was roaming his face with open gentleness and maybe admiration, too.

Softly, she asked. "Why?"

Shift of shadows on his face; the composition of light and dark made him look comics-like, like a mysterious character in a battered trench coat in those old detective books with black-and-white illustrations.

"Why." He groaned. It wasn't much above a whisper. A sigh.

Was she really provoking this out of him? Was it possible? To his all too confused mind it really seemed so.

Lisa studied him. His face was hard, that of someone before the final battle – before falling. Briskly, he closed the gap between them, almost stepping on her toe. To her credit, Lisa didn't budge. Glaring at her from under his eyebrows, through the tangle of words he'd never planned to tell her milling in his eyes, his forehead brushed against hers as he repeated brusquely like it was nonsense, like it wasn't a question but an answer: "Why."

In the focal point of his gaze, Lisa stood motionless, bewitched, straining her eyes to catch the perfect blue in his, catch what he'd do next. And as if it was an answer to all questions- and maybe in a very symbolic way it really was-, Rippner simply leaned in and kissed her; kissed her with eight weeks of vain, barren yearning, with the fatigue of tedious nights in his car, with all the embarrassing secret longing for obtaining a part of her small private moments; kissed her with the month-long emotional journey she forced him on; with the mental clock counting their minutes back. He caught her bottom lip, nipped it in a way only he was able to: imperatively yet with affectionate tenderness. His arms restrained her with a wiry embrace, full of anticipation of a physical battle, of refusal.

The kiss, like a shattered glass, cut in their lips.

His mouth moved against hers, greedy to get closer and claim its stake, just now, just this one time. _Let me- Let me._

He told himself it was nothing but a keepsake – that much he deserved; he'd take it, the token of the memory of her kiss, and proceed on his way. Left and right. No harm in it.

No harm at all.

But it felt like a lie; one of the many he recently tried to shove down his own throat.

He knew he was falling. He undoubtedly was. He could feel it in his chest, in his head, the looming presence of something he could not control or resist. The world, with him in it, got derailed.

Deafened by the frantic thumps of her heart, Lisa found the desperate, almost forlorn desire in herself to respond. Her lonely, secret burden, her sinful, illogical foible seemed ten times heavier now, out in the open. Within reach. Her heart jolted at the ghost of the idea- _within reach_-, and suddenly everything she'd ever believed in, the deep-rooted standards and sound guidelines she'd lived her life following, were smashed into pieces within her, and her whole heart was smashed with it, too, and for a moment it seemed there was nothing to keep her alive, nothing to make her blood circle in her veins but his lips, his hands on her back, his breath on her cheek, and she pushed away. Pushed away because she couldn't decide if he was binding her to life or perishing her.

The world, that had come to a halt moments before, was yet to move on. The whoosh of the passing cars was dulled to a low hum, everything went silent around them as they were standing there on the remnants of their old lives and lies.

He stared at her, his face grave and solemn, mouth slightly open, her kiss still lingering on its fullness. His eyes a shade deeper, darker than they usually were. And suddenly Lisa recognized the expression that was so alike hers, and also realized he'd just revealed himself and she could turn it against him, destroy whatever trifling humanity- _heart_- he was still possessing, treat him with his own medicine triumphantly – she could easily do all of that, but didn't want to. And just then, Lisa felt the fragments of that shattered heart melt away, away with her insides, with her mind, with something vital in her. In the overwhelming sense of grief, she felt a sudden rush of hatred for him, because they could have been so many things, so long ago, and because they couldn't be anymore. She hated him, and not because he kissed her, but because he hadn't kissed her earlier.

And somehow he understood what went through her mind, and it made it even worse. Lisa collapsed against his chest, resignation, complete surrender to something bigger than her in her movements. She clung onto him desperately, and he held her tightly like he didn't want to let her go anymore. Lisa felt his head stir searchingly, slowly. His stubble brushed against her skin as he planted a long kiss on her forehead, on her temple.

At his fleeting touch, something snapped within her, something that flooded her with warmth, burning everything in its wake. She'd always been a bit of an emotional self-torturer, and this time it wasn't any different: in the full knowledge of what it was going to catalyze, Lisa clutched his shoulders in the engulfing tide of her own passion, and tilted her head to meet his lips.

His reaction was all-consuming, overpowering. The sensation was incredible, threatening to madden him, and he groaned into her lips, not able to contain a moan of passion. He had imagined this, he didn't deny it now, not once, not twice – his seemingly innocent fantasies that burnt themselves deeper in his cells than he'd ever suspected or was willing to admit. Reality just proved to him again how tenfold intense it could be. It discharged his senses. Not the kiss itself, not even the maddening sensation of her mouth dancing against his, much more the fact per se, the fact that she let him kiss her. The fact that she kissed him back. With all those things that'd happened between them in the past; with the full awareness of who he was.

His mind, the ever rational, whispered to him that it was temporary, that eventually she would come to her senses.

Lisa opened her mouth to taste him, succumbed to the dazing feeling of his lips against hers. Her arms crept around his neck, fingers finding their way in his thick hair. As a reply he encircled her waist, and pulled her close to his body like she'd always belonged there. In the giddiness of the sensation that put out every rational thought in her head, Lisa couldn't doubt it for a minute. The urgency in his move, as if there were no tomorrow, almost broke her heart because for them, there really weren't.

They broke apart, reluctantly so, a sweet, painful throbbing in their lips.

"Lisa." He buried his face in her hair, leaving hot patches of moist as he breathed in her neck, and she shivered with cold and warm. Even through their coats she could feel his heart beat rapidly. She smoothed a chaste kiss on his earlobe, and he sighed again with broken voice that made her belly quiver. "Lisa."

He could have repeated her name for hours, till he'd believe it was true, it was happening. He ran his lips along her jaw, and felt her tremble.

"It's getting cold. We should go back," he mumbled softly. Lisa didn't answer, only nodded against his shoulder.

They walked back hand in hand. Even on this short distance they stopped twice to get themselves lost in each other's feel.

As they hopped up the stairs to their room, Lisa felt like she was levitating a foot above the ground. Her body seemed to revive from its years-long slumber, and she was shimmering with excitement. Every single touch from him ignited something in her belly. She stepped slowly in the room, hesitantly pulling off her coat. She turned toward him only when the door clicked shut, a resounding, deep noise in the silence. She was unsure what would happen, how it would continue, how they should behave now, in this upside down world, but a look at his face told her everything. His eyes, deep, deep blue now, smoldering blue, were alive with unwavering desire, so thick, so dense, that her stomach jostled around with anxiety, and she was short of breath. She'd never seen him this way, open and unguarded, bare to his very raw emotions. There was also something predatory in his gait as he advanced on her. Lisa took a step back, more as part of her role in the usual game than out of fear, and he smirked. She smirked back. His hands sneaked to the back of her head, and he pulled her to his lips, crushing hers with the full force of his passion. Lisa, bold and chaste at the same time, slipped her hands under his coat, running her fingers along the stretched muscles of his back.

The insistent vibration at their hips went unnoticed for the first five seconds. It was Lisa who identified the source of interruption. She glided her mouth down his chin, nipped it, and murmured.

"Jackson…"

He hinted an affectionate peck on the tip of her nose, and groaned. Easily the worst timing ever. His phone was ringing. _This is the beginning of our end_, he thought somberly.

"I have to… sorry."

Her eyes followed him to the screen door leading to their balcony. He pulled it shut behind him, the phone already glued to his ear. Through the glass, their gazes met, and Lisa frowned, resenting the fact that he didn't want to take his call in front of her.

"Monday at eleven. Room 139 in the main building, western wing. You got it?" Alvarez was asking. Rippner rolled his eyes.

"I didn't. Information overflow, sorry."

"It's not a game, Rippner."

_Tell me about it, idiot_, he snapped inwardly but let it slide this time. "How will I get in?"

"I have someone wait for you at the entrance on Massachusetts Avenue. He will lead you to the room. It's on a corridor closed on account of construction works, no one will be around. There is a security camera inside, right above the door, identification number 139B. I've just sent you the security code to access it. The customer has to watch the scene, understood?"

"Sure, no worries."

Harshly, emphasized by a long pause in the conversation, Alvarez remarked. "A group of agents will be outside the room. I'll lead them personally."

Rippner didn't have to be a genius to recognize the threat behind the words. "Tomorrow at eleven, then."

He ended the call before the agent could slip in any more threats, and checked the message waiting in the phone: the long security code of the camera. He pushed a button to forward the message to Henry. After it was confirmed the message was sent, he initiated a call to his ex-higher-up.

"What's this code?" Henry asked.

Rippner briefed him, sharing the details Alvarez had just given him.

"The guy will watch the show. Don't screw it, Jackson, that's your only chance."

Pinching his nose bridge, Rippner affirmed. "I won't."

"Where are you now?"

He leant over the balcony rail to see the cheap neon sign on top of a pillar at the entrance of the parking lot. "In some motel called Sunshine, just off I-70. Is the dummy ready? The place?"

"Already secured for days. Good luck, Jackson."

Rippner pocketed the phone. He clutched the ice-cold rails, and stared ahead, beyond the straight line of the interstate, the occasional yellow-red stripes cars pulled with them as they sped away. It would be over tomorrow, the event he had been waiting for, planning for weeks now, and yet he didn't feel the relief he was supposed to.

Lisa was still standing at the foot of the bed when he returned, fixing her pondering, serious glance on him. She couldn't believe how easily his face could transform back into the expressionless mask of the manager she loathed, like he wasn't the same man who'd been just kissing her with all his unleashed passion not so long ago.

Rippner shut the cold gush of wind out with a firm pull at the door, and locked eyes with Lisa. He could see her gaze cloud, the wiry frown enter the line of her eyebrows, and he understood the tender moment they'd shared was lost forever now, and he couldn't help but feel a sudden tide of grief.

"You're not going to hurt Keefe, right?"

Coldly, he answered from the corner of his lips. "I told you already, Leese. I won't. I'm giving him what he wants, simple as that."

"When is it then?"

"Eleven, tomorrow."

"Where?"

"At the DHS," he replied flatly, and before she could proceed, he added warningly. "And that's all for you to know."

When an hour later Lisa climbed in her bed, she thought mournfully how sad way it was to end the day. In the other bed he was already fast asleep. She switched off the lamp, secretly glad for the meager light sneaking in the room from the street outside. Propped up on her elbow, she squinted at him. Only a nightstand stood between them, and he was close enough for her to see his face if she strained her eyes. When he was sleeping, when he wasn't pulling on expressions, or as it often happened, pulling them completely off his face, his lips looked different. There was an innocent look to them, maybe because of the slight pout of the upper lip or the slightly sad curve of the fullness of the lower, she couldn't quite decide. He looked so different that she mused whether nature was ridiculing him by giving him this particular look and this particular personality, or he was decidedly ridiculing his own looks by choosing what he was doing for a living.

It was irreversible, the change in her feelings for him, and Lisa couldn't help but wonder if he knew it, if he did it on purpose. If he was capable of achieving such thing. But it didn't matter anymore, she'd had enough of what-ifs and should-have's for a lifetime.

Lisa sat up straight in her bed, threw her legs over the edge, and let her eyes roam his form. She wanted to watch him sleep because no matter if it ended one way or another, it was the last time she could do that.

: :

It was half past seven in the morning when Rippner awoke to a sore feeling in his shoulder and a complete lack of feeling in his left arm. He soon found an explanation when he opened his eyes, his gaze falling on Lisa's curls spread across his chest and gleaming reddishly in the timid sunlight. Sometime during the night, she had slipped in beside him and was now curled up at his side on the narrow bed. The way things went these days, it didn't even take him by surprise. Although he had sworn she wouldn't sleep with him again, he wasn't about to kick her out of the bed. She didn't leave him any choice, he soothed himself, not really bothered what a transparent excuse it was.

He looked up at the ceiling with his heart beating against her palm, and for the first time in many years, in his whole almost thirty-year span of life, he wanted to begin a sentence, many-many sentences a way he never thought he once would: _I wish_.

He wasn't used to this passivity; when he wanted something, he took it. But now it was beyond his reach, out of his control. And in many, many years it was the first time he felt regret. Regret that he hadn't met her earlier, under different circumstances, regret that he wasn't somebody else, or she wasn't somebody else. That it wasn't real, the moment, Lisa in his arms, the peace descended upon them. And he wasn't real either. He regretted so many things he'd done to her, and even those he would do but especially those he'd never done. He didn't regret the blood he'd shed, he regretted he wasn't the man she could accept.

I wish…

_I wish I'd never met you_, his mind settled with an ending eventually, and his arms tightened around her on their own volition.

And in her sleep her fist tightened around his t-shirt, too.

: :

An hour later he was freshly showered and dressed. Lisa started to emerge from sleep when he was zipping his suitcase close, scanning the room for his belongings. She sat up a bit disorientated, blinked against the light. With her tousled hair, the bashful expression on her face when she realized she'd been sleeping in his bed, with the solemn, sad look she was giving him, he all but strode over to the bed and gathered her in his arms.

He swallowed it down, though, and slipped into his coat.

"You're already leaving?" Lisa asked quietly, her voice still hoarse and thick from sleep. She swept her hair out of her face, and he followed the locks with wistful eyes. She was beautiful, and his heart could not contain the loss that he would never see her again this way. He couldn't help but detect the sadness in her eyes as she watched him prepare to leave.

"Give me an hour or two head start, then you're free to go." Rippner cleared his throat to sound steadier. He looked sideways at the table against the far wall. "I left enough money there for a cab and plane ticket. You don't have your own driver's license, so use the one I placed there. You don't have to be in hurry, have a breakfast, a lunch, take your time. I paid the room for one more night. When it's over, I might come back here, that's why," he added explanatorily at her unasked question.

He picked up the laptop bag, grabbed his suitcase.

"After I leave, please don't call your father, I don't want to jeopardize anything."

She didn't seem to be able to find her voice, only nodded a bit absently, dizzily. Rippner turned away, opened the door. How symbolic, he thought wryly, closing this chapter of his life literally with closing a door. Never before felt it so difficult, so _wrong_. He bowed his head, fighting the urge to go back to her, slip in beside her and continue just where Alvarez's call had interrupted them.

It would have only worsened things. Above his shoulder, he glanced back at her. Were there words efficient and appropriate enough in this situation? He pretty much doubted it.

"Take care, Lisa, and thanks for everything."

Lisa eyed him silently, with achingly thumping heart. It was one of those moments; if it were a movie, the main characters would share a passionate, desperate good-luck kiss. Good-bye kiss. Most probably, very easily, it would have been their last. But it wasn't a movie, and she let him go, and he left without any sign he intended to part otherwise.

He walked out of her life just like that. And it left her just as much thunderstruck as when he'd entered it for the second time. It couldn't be this, just this. An end without an end. There were so many things she wanted to tell him, so many things she wanted him to tell her.

Lisa slacked against the headboard heavily, suddenly feeling very drained.

He wasn't cut out for saying tearful goodbyes, that one she knew for sure but the way he left hurt her. He was going to live under Witness Protection and disappear completely, while she was supposed to go back to her normal, dull routine. Their lives would never cross each other again.

Lisa curled into a fetal position, and sighed miserably. She couldn't process the thought. His absence left a void in her chest that seemed to stretch its physical boundaries. She wanted to see him again, just one time. Just to know how he felt about this, even if it was ridiculous. Even if he would mock her for being overly sappy and emotional. Probably for him it didn't mean that much, probably for him she was one of the many women in his life.

She buried her face in the pillow, and whimpered. It still held his scent, and she sniffed, feeling tears brim her eyes.

"Don't be pathetic," she reprimanded herself but it didn't really help.

Suddenly, she bolted upright.

He had said he might come back here. She could wait for him. That one day didn't really count when she'd been away from home for a whole month now.

Finding relief in the thought, Lisa crawled out of bed, and stumbled toward the bathroom to get ready for the day.

: :

They were on time, his Longines confirmed it for the third time in a minute, and Rippner resented his own involuntary display of anxiety. Keefe had a minute to arrive. The room they appointed for the meeting was a mess of bricklayer tools, buckets and ladders. A huge rectangle of white plastic cover was hanging before the window, dotted with grey splatters of plaster. It filtered the natural light, and enveloped the room in constant dimness, giving an ominous glare to the scene for the security camera above the door.

Just as they'd agreed with Alvarez, he'd been waiting at the entrance of the Naval District, just off the buildings of American University, and according to the instructions, an FBI agent- morose, well-built, man of few words- had led him to the main building in the middle of the huge site, a red brick, four-story complex. The corridor they'd walked down was indeed under renovation, though there were no workers in sight, obviously they got a day off today. Alvarez was waiting for them in a niche just across a door with the embedded black sign of 139. Though he'd said it otherwise over the phone, he was alone, except for Rippner's tour guide. Rippner snickered inwardly: it hardly could be called a group of agents.

At the sound of the door opening, he turned around, and greeted Keefe with an arrogant smirk.

"I hope this little meeting is really worth it," the politician remarked sharply.

Rippner smiled coldly. "Oh it is."

Keefe fixed a piercing, hard glare on him he usually used to accompany his moral speeches about the threat of global terrorism. When Rippner didn't appear to be affected by it, he snapped impatiently. "You said you'd give me a name and proof."

"I know what I said," the superior grin never left his face, and Rippner pulled on an expression of deep concentration that was all but real. "But the thing is, it set me thinking: what kind of a deal do we have after all? Was it good enough? Because you see, in a way I'm a businessman, there's no deal without a good offer."

"The offer's that you'd go under Witness Protection."

Clicking his tongue, Rippner pursed his lips with mock disapproval. "You know, I can't decide if this term is offending or simply pathetically naïve. Not to mention if living like that would qualify as life at all."

"Then what do you want? Money?"

"No, definitely not. I probably have more money than an immaculate and honorable politician like you might possess."

"You want to be released? To be set free?" Keefe guessed with increasing annoyance and nervousness. He watched with rising temper as the younger man lifted his eyebrow in a sardonic manner, the wrinkles on his forehead were carved with irony and condescension. It was all he could do not to smack his nose just like that – he'd been famous of his right hook in the army.

"To pick up the role of the poor game in a bloody chase?" Rippner shook his head with a pout. "No, thank you."

"Okay, don't play with me. Why don't you just tell me what you want?"

Rippner smiled as an old memory invaded his mind. He had enjoyed incomparably more their private question and answer game back on the plane with Lisa. His heart unexpectedly skipped a beat. _Lisa_. Irritated, he forcibly pushed the thought out of his mind.

"Let's see. My old life?"

"I'm afraid it's impossible."

"This is what I thought, too. But you know, the idea makes me really sad. Then I started to think about it." He snapped his fingers. "I thought: why not show loyalty to those who'd been nice to me, and maybe in return, they'd show loyalty to me, too. Give me another chance. You know: quid pro quo. Don't think bad guys are all rotten. We have our own moral codes."

"Oh, yes, I can imagine how lofty they are."

"Lofty enough without being cheesy, don't worry. So, where was I? Oh yes. I won't bore you with the details of my inner musings, but what eventually concerns you is that I decided not to rat on our poor guy and spare him. After all, what good would it bring on my associates."

Alarmed, Keefe watched Rippner walk up and down, with his hand behind his back like a professor on the podium.

"So, what now? You plan to bid farewell and walk away?"

"No, unfortunately I can't do that. As a politician you surely understand how we need to sacrifice things sometimes. To show how earnest we are. Symbols, diplomatic gifts, gestures, all that shit."

With strained muscles, Keefe's body tensed. "What are you talking about?"

Rippner's strides came to an abrupt halt as he turned fully toward him. He cocked his head slightly to the side, and studied him with the patience of a parent lecturing his child. "Of course, I'm talking about you."

The moment froze between them. Keefe took a step toward him, an intimidating long stride when out of nowhere, Rippner produced a gun, cockily dangling it around his index finger. Keefe drew back a step, completely shocked.

"How could you bring a gun in here?"

A smile, creepy and arrogant lighting up on his face as Rippner smacked his tongue again. "Tsk. I don't think it should be your gravest concern, now, shouldn't it?"

Keefe was a tall man, well-built, and for his age, in perfect condition. He'd always prided himself for not really losing the physical quickness and balance he'd gained back in the army. Jackson Rippner, shorter, light and lean, looked like a man he could break in half anytime.

So when Keefe lunged at him, the result of the ensuing fight seemed to be all too obvious.

Apparently, Rippner knew everything about pressure points, muscles points, reflex points, as in dazing rapidity, he applied three different ones on him in a row. In the blink of an eye, Keefe found himself kneeling on the dirty floor with Rippner behind his back. The metal tip of the gun's silencer marking a sore point on the back of his neck, signaling how foolish the whole plan had been, showing the real price he had to pay for making a deal with the devil – right now, he wouldn't have given a dime for his own life. Rippner was either a talented actor or betrayed them just how he'd said. Probably both.

If he could take a look at Rippner's face, Keefe would have realized how in line their thoughts were at the moment.

With a contented sneer, Rippner cocked the gun. Standing with his back to the door, he could only hope the guy on the other end of the security camera was enjoying it just as much as he did.

Here they were, in the final act of a too long play. Keefe was so eager to find out the truth about the attempt against him that he went as far as releasing him from prison and giving him a gun while he was standing there defenseless. Rippner regarded him incredulously. For a politician, for the deputy secretary he was incredibly naïve; he was too small for this game to fold up something so vast as this crime organization. It was like a disease, like cancer. Finding the customer, a chessman on the chessboard… so useless. Keefe thought if he burnt out the infection on one point, that would cure everything else, too – but the tissue was scarred and damaged, the malignant tumor too wide-spread to be cured. A whole net of infection.

With voice remarkably steady, though Rippner still could feel the tremble of underlying terror beneath it, Keefe chanced. "You can't get away with this. Don't be foolish!"

Rippner watched him, gun in hand. All it took was a bullet. A well-placed- or misplaced- bullet. And it'd be over. It'd be over either way. Keefe was crazy. How could he trust someone like him? Someone so corrupted. A tiger cannot change its stripes, now, can it?

How could _she_ trust him, to begin with?

They were all crazy. And maybe he was nothing more than the fool who followed the other fools.

"It'll be a real pleasure, Keefe, to finally finish the job."

He smiled drily, and did what summed up the biggest issue in the past half year of his life: pulled the trigger.

: :

"Got the room. We're on the way," came the hasty report over the com. Alvarez acknowledged it with a satisfied grunt as he pressed himself closer to the wall just beside the door to room 139. Several minutes passed in nerve-wrecking anxiety when all he could hear was muffled shuffle of rubber soles against concrete first, then polished parquet a minute later.

As his ears caught the unmistakable pop of a silencer on the other side of the door, he barked in the intercom: "Hurry up, Coulson."

On cue, shouting came over the headpiece, and soon a collected voice announced: "Agent Alvarez, we have the suspect secured."

"Good," was the answer, and Alvarez charged at the door, signaling to the other agent and a med to follow.

The door opened without resistance.

Inside, Keefe was lying on the floor in his own blood, and above him, the creep of a criminal was standing with a disturbing, insolent smirk on his face.

: :

Agent Coulson didn't really come across as a chatty person. That much Martin Carter, Military Advisor of the Office of the Secretary could determine very quickly.

"Would anyone give me an explanation on what's going on? Is there anyone willing to talk?" he repeated for the third time in a row but instead of the four FBI agents swarming his room just a few minutes before and keeping him in place with drawn guns, a fifth voice replied.

"Yes."

The new man was dressed in black, alike his fellow agents but his gait betrayed he was in charge here. After all, Carter had been serving in several different military positions over the last twenty years, and such seemingly trifling signs couldn't go unnoticed for him.

"I'm agent Alvarez."

Pulling himself to full height, Carter glared up at the other man, so much in harsh contrast with the athletic, strong built of the agent and his own ever growing belly and slumped shoulders.

"Good, are these your men? I was just telling them that…" his eyes shifted sideways, rested somewhere above Alvarez's right shoulder. His hand jerked upwards accusatorily. "That man… that was the man who killed Charles Keefe."

With a calm smirk on his face, all Rippner did was perk an amused eyebrow. Alvarez did the talking for him.

"Yes, we know."

"Then why is it me who get arrested? It's unacceptable!"

Shuffling noise came from the corridor, rapidly approaching, nervous steps, and a moment later, with a wan medic in his heels, Charles Keefe stepped in the room. With his right hand, he was pressing a fistful of gauze to his neck, right below his ear. Carter, abashed, gaped at him with unhealthily whitened face.

"I… I thought…"

"No, I'm not dead, Martin… Mr. Rippner here is evidently a lousy shot."

"Rippner? But that's…" A moment of silent process of information. He apparently gave it up, because not without a hint of annoyance, Carter admitted: "I don't understand."

"You've been on my list, but never suspected it really could be you."

Confused, Carter shook his head. "Could be what?"

Calmly, especially for a man with a bullet-carved wound on his neck, Keefe stated. "The one who ordered my assassination back in Miami."

Carter physically recoiled as if Keefe had just hit him. "What are you talking about? I've never seen this Rippner other than in the news."

"Of course, you haven't. We never get the assignment in person. Not the operatives, at least," Rippner interjected smugly.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I'm talking about someone close to me placing my name on a death note. To find out who exactly it was, we orchestrated this little setup. If you'll excuse me," Keefe said, as if it was a courtesy visit, and sank onto the chair just opposite Carter's walnut-wooden desk. The nervous medic immediately rushed to his side to change the bloody gauze to a clean one and check on the injury. "The security cameras in this wing were turned off this morning. The official reason was the ongoing construction work. We were monitoring everyone's system, every single computer and mobile. Switching to camera 139B, you rebooted the security monitoring system."

His voice thundering, Carter exclaimed. "It was a routine check. I accidentally saw it."

Keefe had a dry smile across his lips as he remarked: "Till this morning, 139B hadn't existed. You couldn't just accidentally find it unless you were specifically searching for it."

Turning a shade of angry red, Carter growled with increasing anxiety as if only now realizing what a mess he'd gotten into: "This is ridiculous. It popped up on my monitor out of nowhere. I thought it was an old footage!"

"Oh really? We'll see." Gesturing toward the other man, Keefe looked back over his shoulder. "Rippner?"

Without the need for further instructions, Rippner pulled out his cellphone while every eye in the room focused on him. Henry picked it up almost immediately.

"It's me. Keefe's out. I'm just outside the complex, could barely escape the FBI. Hope our guy's satisfied. When the coast is clear, we'll talk how to proceed, right?"

"Don't worry about that. Good job, Jackson. Clear out of there."

Confidently, Rippner pocketed the phone without any comment. For a moment the room was enveloped in complete silence while Carter fidgeted without a clue as to what this new step was escalating into. Then a soft buzz of a phone resounded, and Alvarez leapt to Carter, without asking for permission, reached in the other man's breast pocket, and retrieved his mobile.

"I guess it's for you," he gazed cursorily at the display, and placed his thumb over the button to accept the call. With his other hand, he lifted the gun, and aimed it at his head. "Not a wrong word."

He put the phone on speaker. On the other end of the line, it was silence, before at Alvarez's nudging, Carter forced out a hoarse 'yeah?'. The voice answering him was cool and matter-of-factly. Keefe turned toward Rippner for confirmation, and he gave an assuring nod.

"Rippner's just called, says the job's done," Henry informed. "He managed to escape but don't worry, he'll be taken care of. We already have the girl."

Spotting Keefe's confused look, Carter mumbled absently. "What girl?"

"Lisa Reisert, remember? We found her back in their motel. Rippner's the next. Don't worry, we'll take this over from here."

With that, Henry ended the call.

The ensuing silence was heavy with dread from both sides. Carter seemed to slowly understand it just had been the seal on his fate, and protested with full volume when Alvarez informed him that he was under arrest. In the chaos, Keefe called to the four agents guarding the door.

"Okay, take him. Then seize everything here, his laptop, cellphone, everything. I don't want anything to miraculously disappear."

As Carter was lead out of the room, there was a silent exchange of glances between Alvarez and Keefe before the agent strode up to Rippner, and with a smooth, fast move, he clicked a pair of handcuffs around his wrists.

"What are you doing? We had a deal!"

With barely concealed delight, Alvarez grabbed his elbow to hold him in place.

"We first make an investigation. When everything is cleared, you can go." Slyly, he added. "Besides, we've yet to prepare your witness profile, right? Turning you into an inconspicuous middle class citizen."

Ignoring the agent, Rippner glared directly at Keefe. "It wasn't mentioned in the deal."

"That's the procedure."

Trying to contain his temper, Rippner hissed. "What about Lisa? You heard him, right?"

After a beat of unsure silence, Keefe promised with his guarded politician-face. "We'll make our move."

Rippner suddenly grew incredibly angered. Shaking off the agent's hand, he took a heavy step toward Keefe and spat with all his venom and bitterness he could muster: "The hell you will. You don't give a damn what happens to her! Collateral damage, right?"

That made Keefe jump to his feet, losing his cool.

"Some nerve you have. If I remember correctly, it was you who kidnapped her. Did you give a damn what you were pushing her into?"

Rippner blew the air out loudly. He breathed in. Anger wouldn't take him far, he knew. He exhaled. Lisa was in danger. Quietly, calmly but letting the well-portioned despair seeping through his voice, he tried to negotiate.

"Let me go after her."

Alvarez snorted. "Yeah, like you would."

Rippner disregarded him, and stared at Keefe instead. "Mr. Keefe, I'm the one they want, and I'm the only one who could find her. I could talk to them."

"Agent Alvarez is right. I can't let you go to run around freely, Rippner."

Rippner bit his bottom lip. His heart jostled around in his chest. They had to let him go. Never before had he despised Keefe like he did at the moment when the politician was in the full knowledge of sacrificing Lisa. Lisa, who was so naively devoted to him.

"Without me, you'd never find her. You know that. And you have nothing to fear: they'd never take me back after what I've just pulled. Sooner rather than later when word gets around. Probably they already know I misled them."

Keefe eyed him curiously, and Rippner sensed the wavering determination in his stance, and with weak hope he realized, Keefe just as much wanted to have Lisa safe as he did.

"Why would you risk your life for Ms. Reisert?"

Rippner set his jaw, his gaze turning cold and unreadable. "I have my own reasons."

"You understand that it's not good enough an explanation, right?"

Rippner glared silently, the muscle in his jaw twitching with annoyance. Suddenly Alvarez barked an incredulous laughter.

"Can the Stockholm Syndrome work the other way around?"

"Fuck you," he growled with low voice. Alvarez only smirked at him, reveling in his fury and embarrassment.

Ironically, this was what granted him what he wanted. Keefe heaved a sigh, and gestured to a very dumbstruck Alvarez to take off the handcuffs and release him.

: :

His hand froze on the key in the ignition. It was both the metaphorical and, seeing the junction ahead, literal crossroads.

He could do two things: either run, play the hero and probably get killed, or what he was the best in: taking care of himself, withdrawing his funds from the various bank accounts and fleeing the country, leaving everything behind, Keefe, the FBI, the company, Lisa.

Yes, Lisa, too.

He didn't delude himself anymore: the last one wasn't an option. Even the dilemma popping up in his mind seemed to be nothing but routine, old instincts reviving, habit of saving himself and only himself coded in his DNA ever since he could remember. He wasn't suicidal, that was true. But this was the first time it occurred to him that he'd never really wanted to look deeper under the surface, never questioned things that were given, and never tried to figure out if things could or should be otherwise in his life. Now Lisa made him ask the question, made him doubt himself, his way of living and seeing things, and she did it without force, without any expectation, without words. It was enough she was around. That she existed. That she kissed him back. That she'd been waiting for him at their roadside motel. Ridiculous enough, the mere thought of her not existing anymore qualified as some form of suicide for him.

The life he was conducting, technically, in fact, wasn't anything more than the reflection of other people's lives. He, the mere onlooker, let their train pass him by, and on the platform, he was watching them go by, the draught slapping him. With detached calmness, he became the part of their everyday courses, having nothing on his own; and later, all these details, all these secondhand memories were wiped away with their lives, and he moved on to the next. Between two assignments, he hated the breaks, the time he was granted to build something for himself, but always was forced to make it short for not knowing how long the pause might last. In these intermissions, only momentary indulgences could require a slot in his days, and it was fine with him because on the other end of the spectrum, all he saw was a 9-to-5 pattern of boredom that he despised ever since a child.

Or rather, till he met her.

And ironically, Lisa's life was one of the most boring ones out of his marks, and still, it shook something within him, stirred a desire he'd never even known existed.

Rippner had never had illusions: their ways could cross only by force from his side, the likes of them never matched, and there was no way he could expect her to behave with anything but animosity toward him. Toying with the possibility of them ending up together was like a child daydreaming of being an astronaut when growing up. Something that the very inner part of him was craving for, but knew would be impossible. An alternate universe he could build up for himself and it wasn't anything but ointment for wounds he wasn't even aware of. Maybe a bit of normalcy and innocence he liked to sink into, like a cushion in leisure time, and that was all.

This was how he liked to label it.

And then, suddenly the tables were turned when she reciprocated whatever twisted and sick desire he poured on her. It was far beyond any comprehensible explanation. It brought his astronaut-dreams to light, within reach, intrigued, challenged him if he still wanted it, and what he would possibly do for it.

Saving the day. Going against everything he'd ever been and believed in.

And ironically, by doing so, he was aware of something else that came with it: losing everything.

Losing her.

: :

The wires were the first they ripped off him. The second was the tracker hidden in his shoes. He'd told Alvarez these men weren't idiots.

Next thing, they retrieved his luggage from the trunk of the Audi, loaded it into their black Cherokee. Never leave a trace behind, the number one golden rule in this business.

The three men waiting for him at the motel were vaguely familiar; the third, named Lloyd, he never really liked. Lloyd had no style, and more importantly, no objections in any form. His presence here was definitely not a good sign.

As Rippner got in their car, his eyes travelled along his captors' features, along the chopped lips here, the fresh bloody scratches grooved with fingernails there, and smiled. Lisa had apparently put up a good fight. A surge of pride shot through him that got immediately trampled down by worry. He had no idea in what state he would find her wherever they were going to take him, and his stomach sank.

It was an industrial area with warehouses situated far from each other on the lots divided by cracked concrete roadways. The snow looked almost untouched, except for the few track lines of car tires crossing it. The huge hangar they parked with the car in showed no difference from the others around. Inside it was cold and poorly lit, the air heavy with the smell of steel and gasoline. Apart from an old bulldozer, there was no stock in the warehouse.

In the back of the premise, huddled on a wooden pallet, Lisa gazed up at the approaching group. Rippner's throat constructed at the look of worry in her eyes as she recognized him among the men. His eyes roamed her, searching for serious wounds but apart from fright and minor injuries, she appeared fine.

"Ah, Jackson," Henry welcomed him with a tone as though he was surprised to see him there. He was standing a few yards off, in the doorway of a room that once had to be an office. He pulled the door close, and the men surrounding Rippner took a step back, giving space.

Catching the glance Rippner had shared with Lisa, Henry gestured toward her with the ghost of an amused smile.

"You'll be pleased to hear what an interesting thing happened here. I tried to get some information about the infamous flight since Miss Reisert seemed so keen on sharing her memories with me before, but to my utter surprise, she didn't elaborate now."

Feeling a proud smile force its way on his lips, Rippner replied flippantly. "Oh, haven't I mentioned she can be very adamant when forced? Maybe you should have said _please_."

"Well, unfortunately, it will forever stay a mystery," Henry shook his head, a hint of regret shooting though his expression. "You realize you're gonna die, don't you, Jackson?"

"Everything comes to an end," he remarked softly.

"Always so stoic. Even before the end. I always liked that in you. For the memory of good old times, your death will be as painless as possible. Such a shame it had to end this way but I understand, really. You created a very delicate situation for yourself."

Lloyd stepped closer again, and steered him toward the pallet Lisa was kneeling on.

"You can watch her go first." Smirking hungrily, Lloyd added: "Her death won't be so humane. There're quite a lot of people at the company who'd happily kill her, including me. All that work and time invested in that case…"

"What are you talking about? It was my case, my time and work!"

"And we added ours to the preparation, the techs, ops, everyone."

Rippner shook off the hand gripping his elbow, and snapped. "Yeah, right, but it was nothing compared to mine. My eight weeks wasted on it, my wounds, my fucking body and life on the line."

"It doesn't make any difference." Lloyd pulled Lisa roughly to her feet, pushed her against the wall, and kept her there with his forearm pressed against her throat.

Suddenly, Lisa's arm shot out, and the base of her palm connected with Lloyd's nose. He hollered and clutched his face before backhanded her. As a payment, Lisa spat the blood at him.

_That's my Lisa._ As soon as the thought sprang to life in his head, Rippner bore down it cruelly. She was about to ruin everything, including her well-being.

"Lisa!" he said authoritatively, warningly. Lisa blinked at him, and seeing his serious glare, she went motionless. She leant her head against the wall, and watched him with haunted, longing eyes. He knew what she was thinking of, because that was exactly what ran through his mind, too.

Henry stated apathetically. "She's a pain in the ass, Jackson. I see why you failed."

Crossing his arms, Rippner gave just as an apathetic nod toward the other man, using the patronizing expression that he was the master of.

"You know, I wouldn't be so rushed with your little execution party. I happened to know there are some very intriguing pieces of information about you in the FBI database. So intriguing that the company might not even give you a chance to clear your name."

"What are you talking about?"

"Don't worry," Rippner only gave him a cocky smile. "Anything can be undone with a bit of good work and cooperation."

Henry turned on his heels, and disappeared in the back office for a few long and heavy minutes before returning with a taut scowl.

"You're aware that you've just signed your own death warrant, right? There's no way I'd let you go after pulling this."

"Good because I didn't have this in mind."

"What did you have in mind?"

A heartbeat-long silence. Rippner shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and claimed. "Let her go. Safe and sound, and leave her alone for good. She's harmless, knows nothing."

The silence seemed to freeze everyone in the warehouse as they gaped at Rippner, at Lisa. Eventually it was Lloyd who lost it.

"What are you, Jackson? Some fucking Crusader? Or is she your new fuck?

Losing all sparks of smug humor, Rippner snorted. "Don't be ridiculous."

"Care to tell me why would you ask something like this?"

"It's my business."

Lloyd pulled his gun out. "Wrong answer."

"Jackson, answer the question," came Henry's authoritative voice. Rippner shrugged, stole a glance at Lisa who was fixating him with unwavering attention.

"An old promise I plan to keep. My conscience wants you to let her go. She's been a great opponent, one of the best I've ever met; that alone earned her the right to live."

Lloyd laughed coldly, swirled the gun pompously around his finger like a Western hero. "Always so proud of your skills, right? If someone happens to match you, they can't be anything but magnificent."

"Something along that line, yeah."

Lloyd snapped his fingers. "Too bad you're in no position to trade."

"Really? Then go ahead without my help."

"Or I just go ahead and shoot you right now."

"Then shoot me."

"Okay."

In the enormous space, among the metal walls and fixtures, the shot rang deafeningly. It was followed by Lisa's strangled cry of terror as she watched Rippner fall on the floor. For a moment, the world darkened and ceased moving with a sudden stop like it crushed against a wall.

Through her dread, Lisa stared. She was relieved to realize he was only shot in his right leg, but as he struggled to sit upwards, plastering his hand on the wound, her heart skipped a beat at the look in his eyes. It was fleeting, only for those perceptible who knew him that much: the cloud of fear. That was when she realized they were going to die.

Through clenched teeth, with voice wavering with pain and anger, Rippner growled up at Lloyd with pure disgust. "I still won't help you, dickhead. Let her go, and I'm all yours. She's of no use for you anyway."

Calmly, Henry stepped closer, directing Lloyd away from Rippner. "Why are you so sure we wouldn't kill her afterwards?"

With a strangled smile, with the remnants of his old respect for the other man, Rippner remarked. "You've always been a gentleman. Just as I, you keep your word. I trust you."

Henry gave the same smile as was on Rippner's face. "Fine, we have a deal then."

"Good." Rippner was all business again as though he weren't sitting in his own blood in a distant warehouse somewhere in Maryland, just between life and death. Closer to death, actually. "Put her on the first plane to Miami, and give her a phone. When she calls me and I'm sure she's safe, we can have the deal."

There was a moment of hushed exchange between the armed men while Rippner felt his eyes search for her gaze. Lisa, not forced to stay at the wall anymore, yet pressing her body to it like she couldn't move away, returned the gaze so sadly that made Rippner bite in his own lip.

"All right, Jackson. She'll be taken to the airport right away."

One of the men Rippner could not recall the name of gripped her arm and led her toward the Cherokee. Over her shoulder, Lisa locked her gaze with his, a desperate glint in the depth of the green orbs as if it was she who was marching into death, not him. His heart wanted to break out of his chest as millions of thoughts rushed through his head, millions of words and acts and glances they'd shared or were to share if things were different.

Before he knew it, Rippner spoke up: "Let me talk to her for a moment."

Lisa, not waiting for permission, tore her arm out of the steely grip, and hurried back to him. Her gaze fell on the rapidly increasing red blur on his pants as she crouched beside him. For a moment neither seemed to be able to talk.

"Why are you doing this?" she mumbled, unable to look at him. "I thought you weren't suicidal."

"Sometimes there's no other way. I'm already doomed anyway. I'd been so ever since-" he faltered to an abrupt halt. Ever since. Ever since he'd started to see her for more than a mark. Ever since he allowed himself to watch her for two months for nothing but his own delight. Ever since he stopped being professional. He couldn't tell that, though in hindsight, it was probably the closest to the truth. "Ever since the flight."

"The flight." Her head was reeling. Those had to be someone else's memories.

How could they get this far? Their journey across the country was just as much physical as emotional, maybe even a bigger journey than killing miles and miles of road. After everything they'd gone through, her old safe and normal life had never been less appealing than that instant. She had no doubt now, whatever way it ended, he eventually managed to break her heart, ruin her life yet again, if unintentionally. _You'll never forget him_, her heart whispered, and she realized how tragic it was. How utterly sick and screwed, too. Never forget him, and not because of what he'd done but for what he'd never done to her.

"Call me when you're safe. Let me know if something's off. I don't think they'd hurt you but still…"

"I'll be okay, Jackson," she breathed weakly. She refused to cry, not in this grim dirty warehouse, before these men. Her fingers brushed the back of his hand still pressing against the wound. It was a secret touch, she hid it from the prying eyes; it was only theirs.

Rippner watched her intensely, and this time she didn't mind it.

"I'm sorry," he said suddenly.

And he really was. For the mayhem he'd put her through, the half-lies and half-truths, the pain, fights and blame ever since he'd waltzed into her life through the backdoor. He watched her face, knowing all too well it was very well the last time they would see each other.

He was still selfish enough to relish in the knowledge what irreversible changes he'd had on her life, turning it upside down – it was his legacy. He thought back at the immeasurable impact _she_ claimed on _his_ life in the past almost half year, and Rippner realized his apology wouldn't lead him that far that he'd change any of it. No matter the fall that left him shattered, the rage that'd consumed him and made him run into his own demise. Knowing that probably he was as much of her undoing as she was for him soothed him.

"For what?" Lisa whispered, looking utterly confused.

It wasn't a look saying 'for what exactly of all those things you've done to me', and he knew then, _knew_ very well she really didn't understand, couldn't guess what there was for him to be sorry for. That very minute, at the manifestation of such forgiveness and absolute lack of regret for her past lost-forever life, all the things he'd robbed her of, something shifted in him. With a belated thunderbolt of realization he recognized what, in fact, he'd just lost with her; also recognized he was not in control anymore; something all-powerful took it over, and very probably all he was granted was the choice between two different kinds of misery. And this time regret was real because he was being selfish again, mourned the possibilities he would never take with her now.

He stilled his hands that wanted to reach out to touch her but couldn't still his heart. If he could kiss the right now invisible dimples beside her lips, the evidence that she could wear a true smile all for him…

He let her go without any physical contact, still wary of its irresistible, irrational power over him, still thinking that eliminating it, he would eliminate, cut off the puppeteer strings pulling his heart, his will in unpredictable ways. With the last shred of a coherent old-Jackson thought, he dismissed her with the inward farewell: _This is our last time_.

He hoped it would serve as his absolution, would redeem him in a way, wash him clean and bring his rest after it ended here.

: :

The phone was shaking in her hand.

The first outbound flight from Baltimore to Florida was scheduled to Fort Lauderdale.

After a numb and long drive to the airport she spent lying on the backseat with a blindfold covering her eyes, and after the nerve-racking routines of the airport security check, Lisa boarded the plane. Now with her seatbelt on, she turned toward the window, and slumped against the wall, staring at the only number programmed in the memory of the mobile she was given. Almost all of the passengers were already seated when her thumb pushed the call button, dreading what might wait for her on the other end of the line.

He picked up immediately, almost before it properly rang out. "Lisa?'

Her voice came as a whisper. "Yes."

"You're okay?"

"Yeah."

"Are you sure?"

Lisa groaned, tears bubbling in her throat. She could hear him softly chuckle on the other end. How absurd it was that he chose to bring back this particular memory now; now that she was on a plane again.

"The plane's about to take off…" she remarked, rather just to say something. She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her fingertips to the corners just like he used to do it. "What will happen to you?"

"We'll have the deal."

"But… then?" At the ensuing silence, her heart clenched so vehemently that it took her breath away. "They will-?"

She couldn't make herself say the word. But she didn't really have to.

After another stretch of silence, his voice came. "No."

Lisa choked on her tears, realizing only now that she was crying. "The first time I know you lie to me. Does it serve you now?"

"It was meant to serve _you_," he said softly.

"Jackson." Lisa fought back a sob. "Jackson… I just… we…"

"No, don't."

With voice thick with emotions, Lisa groaned. "You don't even know-"

"Maybe I don't. But it's too late anyway. It's always been too late."

_For us_. She could hear the two trifling words lingering in the air. Her heart dropped. How could he say that?

Weeping openly, Lisa watched the flight attendants bustle around. She was afraid her heart might spill out with the words she had to say. "I have to switch it off."

"It's okay. Just take care. I'm sorry for all of this, Leese."

"No… don't…" She wanted him to stop speaking with such infinity. Below her the floor started to tremble as the rotors roared into life. "I can't end this."

He knew just as much as she did that Lisa wasn't only referring to the call.

"I'll do it for you," he whispered quietly, calmly. She wished she could see him just one more time, with that soft look in his eyes. "Forget me, Leese. Forget everything and move on."

When he ended the call, something else, something obvious and simple and naïve ended, too.

Lisa didn't really remember the rest of the flight. Before take-off, she texted to her father, telling him to pick her up at the airport, and she hugged her sweater to her chest, silently crying into its folds; on its sleeve, his blood from when she'd touched him had already dried.

The irony of the situation wasn't lost on her: the last time she was on a plane, she was threatened with her dad's life by a high-profile assassin, and now, the next time she had to fly, she was crying her heart out because somewhere in an abandoned warehouse, after trading in everything he had for her safety, the very same assassin was most probably bleeding his life out.

The sun had just started to set when she landed in Fort Lauderdale. The familiar form of her father drew an askew smile on her face as he hugged her tightly. One full month had passed since they met, and Lisa felt that this month was a pivotal point in her life and personality, changing everything forever.

"Lisa, honey, are you okay?"

She couldn't make herself lie because nothing was fine and she hadn't been so much _not_ okay for a long time. Ironically enough, this time her father let it drop as he examined her from head to toe.

"Is that blood?"

Lisa, fresh tears swarming her eyes, was still clutching the sweater. "Not mine."

"Give me that, I'll trash it."

"No!" she exclaimed fiercely, hugging it even tighter to her chest.

How could she tell him that this sweater, the brownish, dry blood-flowers on it, was the only thing that remained for her of a man her father shouldn't even know she had feelings for?

"Don't ask anything, please. Just take me home."


	15. Astray

**A/N:** Thank you so much for the comments and alerts. Especially now that I'm quite stuck with writing this, they mean a lot.  
Also, thank you, Evelyn, if it's anywhere near good, it's because of you!;)

**A/N#2: **The quote is from the novel "Love in the time of cholera" by the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

* * *

**Chapter 15: Astray**

Lisa spent two days in complete oblivion and stupor in her bed at her father's house. She retreated to her old pink room, full of the memories of someone who only looked like her. Full of memories of someone who looked like him. She had trouble to reconcile the man in these haunting, horrific memories with the man she'd just left behind to his fate.

This was the first time she set foot in the house ever since the flight.

The reason that it left her now crushed stood in blaring contrast with what it'd have been a few months earlier. Her father had repaired and put everything back in place, but he couldn't wipe them clean of the events that had uncoiled among these walls, the imprint they'd left behind. The doors, rooms, the creaks of the stairs. The floor where he'd fallen. Where she'd fallen. She could see their whole inglorious history embedded in every object around her, reminding her of their fight here. Reminding of how differently they parted now.

Reminding of how unlikely it was that they would ever meet again for a reason she wouldn't even want to think of.

She was lying in her old bed like a log, with just as much vigor in her, just as much life. She was shifting in and out of a state when nothing felt real, only the phantom pain of him in her heart. Her mind seemed to have shut down, nothing more than trifling impulses coming through her senses could scrape its surface, but none set root. Never before she'd felt it with such finality that she wouldn't ever be the same again. This room and her old life with their trophies and personal objects, the colors and smell and everything that once had been part of her life hadn't seemed so alien even after the rape. They were strangers: the girl who had once decorated this room, and the one who occupied the bed now.

She kept the stained sweater hugged to her, and the phone she'd talked to him on for the last time. Throughout the whole night, her eyes, hollow and scratching dry like she'd forgotten to blink for hours, were fixated on the screen, waiting for it to light up. She could hear his voice, the last lie, always the lie ringing in her ears, the lie that he would be all right, and the last truth: that it'd always been too late for them. In the darkest hours of her misery, in the longest, blackest hours of the night when dawn seems so far away and nonexistent, in a choking moment of despair Lisa dialed that number again, and though she knew it wouldn't connect, the mechanical, unfazed voice informing her about the number she'd dialed not being a working number made her chest convulse.

She wondered if they would still let him have it painlessly, for the sake of old times.

At the thought, Lisa drilled her face into the mattress, wishing she were at least half as stoic about it as he had appeared.

Her heart seemed a crumpled place with all the unsaid words, all the things she'd never experienced with him, all the things she'd never find out – sitting over the smithereens of lost chances, Lisa found herself bargaining again, but this time, not against the heart; this time she was willing to make a deal with the devil. Any deal. Give in to the senseless _I-would_'s and _if-I_'s, to irrational theories starting with the same words: _If we had a second chance…_

She couldn't cry, and that too engraved the ache deeper into her bones. Her tears had dried off during the drive from the airport, but she hadn't been aware of those tears, hadn't concentrated on loading them with the burden her heart couldn't take any longer. There had been no release in them. Now that she was craving for them, they wouldn't come.

The more she tried to suppress the thought of him and hide it from herself with the instinct of self-preservation, the more her mind mocked her by dragging it out during the shallow, disturbed naps she was able to take. She was dead tired, fatigue hung from her shoulders like a second skin.

Then the second night- or maybe it was morning; hard to tell with the blinds pulled down, with her metabolism on hold- Lisa dreamt of him again, dreamt of losing him, and woke up with the irrevocable feeling that she couldn't go on anymore. Sitting there, shot upright, it took her a full heart-churning minute to realize the tears returned. And she cried then, putting her heart in it, her hopes and ridiculously sick wishes that died young, shoving in her grief, too large for her body. Through the tears, the hiccups, the gasps for air, she tried to ride it out. His memory. The idea that she, for the rest of her life, was destined to forever compare every man she might meet to someone she never had.

Her father was worried sick but gave her enough space and time for which Lisa was grateful albeit it inflated her desolation further. All she was able to do was assuring her father that he hadn't hurt her, hadn't touched her – how ironic that the latter was the same thing that gripped her heart with shameful sorrow.

She couldn't talk about it with her father. With anyone, for that matter. It felt the same like after the attack in the parking lot when she'd kept the shame to herself, unable to match words to it. That time her body had been raped. Now it felt her heart was.

She immediately dismissed the thought. It was untrue, unfair to him. She, on her own volition, handed it over to him.

The third day she remembered Keefe, and suddenly Lisa didn't want anything more than to speak to him and be in the DHS complex, at the place where _he_ had been just three days earlier, to know what and how things had happened, the little details she hadn't had the part in.

In her old purse they'd found among the debris of the FBI Field Office in Miami- _the same debris where you met him for the second time_, her mind interjected- and delivered to her father, Lisa found her mobile with the necessary contact details, and called the politician. She inquired if the job offer was still open, and when she was assured that they were still counting on her, Lisa started to arrange the move to Washington, much to her father's dismay.

Not a day after her phone call with Keefe, agent Alvarez got in contact with her, asking politely but with the kind of authority no one should ignore, if she would visit him at the Field Office to give her statement. Lisa, to get over and done with it preferably sooner than later, didn't hesitate for too long. She tried to give as precise details about the events at the warehouse as she was able to recall around the painful constriction of her heart.

As it turned out, this was the easier part of the task.

Alvarez wanted to know why she hadn't tried to escape, why she wasn't physically abused during the month of her abduction. She gave, to her own ears, an implausible babble about their truce, how she'd become convinced about the secret agreement with Keefe – though it was the truth, somehow it pained her to paint a false picture of _him_ just so Alvarez wouldn't suspect she had feelings for someone she shouldn't. She refused to give any explanation on why he ran to help her at the warehouse beyond a tight-throat remark that he'd promised her she wouldn't be hurt, and that he was a man of his word. She couldn't come up with a better answer even for herself, to begin with. Lisa was positive that Alvarez either didn't believe her, or- if she was lucky- deemed her pitifully naïve and idealistic.

It was a horrible day.

From the FBI office, she went back to her old apartment with the loaded and taped close cardboard boxes littering the rooms, with her furniture wrapped up in plastic foil, and she lay on the bare floor, wondering when the world had lost its colors, when _she_ had, like an old clock, lost a cogwheel within her.

At the beginning of the following week, with about a month delay compared to the original plan, she could finally start her employment as Charles Keefe's personal assistant at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington.

: :

Lisa was secretly relieved to be out of Miami and, in a way, under the protection of the DHS, in case _they_ decided she was considered a threat and had to be taken out, no matter what agreement they might have entered into. She could only hope they would leave her family out of the picture.

Janine, Keefe's previous assistant, now with a considerably more protruding belly, had been forced to stay on board while Lisa was missing.

Engaging in the challenges of her new job contributed to the old and working receipt Lisa had long since learned to thrive on, but never before had it felt so wrong and forced and fake.

During their long initial discussion with Keefe, he apologized for the unsavory deal he'd agreed to, just like he'd done back then at the FBI office before everything started. That moment the world turned unbearably absurd for Lisa: everything seemed to move on as if the past one month had never really existed, though it'd shaped her life so effectively that it got almost disfigured. Keefe had no idea there was nothing she expected him to apologize for. He clearly misinterpreted her haggard face, the undeniable signs of fatigue, presumably attributing them to the predicament she'd gone through. Lisa, understandably, didn't hurry to correct him.

The investigation in Martin Carter's case was kept a secret as much as it was possible amid the thousands of off the wall rumors and media coverage the Military Advisor's arrest evoked. Keefe was very busy those days, being continuously in touch with the FBI and Alvarez. Though Lisa had access to many secret documents, as much as she tried to get information on this particular topic, she ran into brick walls. Somehow it left her frustrated. She considered this case as _his_ legacy, and like everything that was as much as remotely connected to him, became an item on her wish list, something to be collected.

Her new colleagues greeted her with stating how lucky she was to have gotten out of that ordeal alive. They all expressed that it had to be horrifying to be kidnapped by a criminal, and Lisa just nodded assent, letting them believe whatever they wanted to. She didn't trust her own voice, she was afraid she would put too much passion in her words, defensive words. Defensive of her. Defensive of him. So she just left it at that.

It came back kicking her in the stomach when, after two weeks of emotional void that tossed her into constant dullness, Keefe's Public Affairs' secretary, overzealous, too eager to please, brought her the news of the day with a bleary smile.

"You heard it? They just found a body near Baltimore. They think it's Rippner."

Lisa, with a deadly calm face, stared at him. In the whirlwind of these words, she briefly wondered when exactly she managed to develop her professional mask into perfection; she also mused if she had actually become like _him_. Something in the past weeks stopped functioning in her, something that should normally connect her brain with her heart.

"They _think_?"

The man, Baker, shrugged. "The remnants are pretty damaged. They found it under a layer of cement, the usual scenario. Seems he was shot in the leg first, then also in the head. Three times." His little interjected laugh hit Lisa as one of the most grotesque things recently. "One was more than enough of that bullet to kill him. Big chunk of the head went missing. A rifle maybe, or something similar in power. Pretty nasty death if you ask me. He must've been a really unpopular guy."

Lisa felt an automat switch on within her, like an emergency mode she'd had no knowledge about, and as she'd seen it in the movies several times, Lisa managed with a level-headed tone. "They need me to identify the body?"

Again that laugh, the grotesque one, rattling like an empty can against the pavement. "I don't think you could. Not necessary, no. They're going to conduct a DNA test and see if it matches."

"Okay," she nodded approvingly. The emergency mode was faltering, she could feel it slip, shatter. Lisa smoothed down the nonexistent wrinkles of her suit, trying to smooth her jumbled nerves too. Her head was reeling, throbbing. _Run. Run… run… run_. She prompted. "Is the agenda for the press conference done yet? Keefe has to check it latest today."

"Not yet complete. Still need an hour."

Steadily, she emphasized its urgency. "Send me when it's done."

Lisa left him standing there, and dashed down the corridor. The restroom was empty as it usually was at lunch time.

Suddenly her body seemed too tight, too many things clattered in her, and she wanted to get rid of at least a part of it. Staggering to the nearest stall, she snapped the buttons on her jacket open, trying to inhale deeply. Inside, fallen on her knees, she leant over the toilet and retched, trying to throw up the pain, the elemental feeling of loss but nothing got past her throat. The greatest misery was always the hardest to subdue.

"Oh my God," she creaked miserably. The plain tiles echoed it, doubling, tripling her shock.

Half a head missing.

She choked on dry tears. It was so surreal. The man she loved, the man who could kiss her a way no one had been able to for a very long time… if ever…

She couldn't process the thought, and it bashed her into a numb state.

It felt like it came out of nowhere, though the news was anything but surprising after the events at the warehouse. Ever since she'd left him there, sitting in his own blood, she recognized that he had finally miscalculated his steps. A flaw in the plans. He had surely planned it otherwise, with a different end for himself, but the company was quicker, smarter this time, and he couldn't fool them. He was a human being, after all – the thought crushed her now; the thought that, apart from her, there were other people, dangerous people who could outmaneuver him; that he wasn't all-powerful.

Heaving heavily, she rested her forehead on her arms.

Somehow it felt now she'd lost him for the second time.

: :

Everything had grown slow lately, and silent.

Lisa turned off the engine. The low hum of the motor was replaced by the drumming of raindrops against the windshield, and she stared out at the sad scene, the grey curtain between her and the rest of the world. During the one month, he'd given her something she hadn't known before or had lost in the traumatic experience of the rape, and when she accustomed to it, he'd taken it back in the end.

She looked over at her building. What was the point in going in, taking a shower, eating leftovers, then going to bed and waking up the next day again like nothing had happened?

She wanted to go somewhere, anywhere where…

Her train of thoughts stumbled to a halt. Where? Why? It wasn't like she could unload her problems and flee. It wasn't like she could detach herself from the feeling that rattled in her without a place, without a subject, and in its rattling shattered everything else it knocked against. A line from a book popped up in her mind. "_The time had come to ask herself with dignity, with majesty, with an irrepressible desire to live, what she should do with the love that had been left behind without a master."_

Suddenly it made terrible sense to her. He was gone, but he didn't bring this with him, and she had nowhere to go without pulling it after her on elastic rope, always dragging her heart, dragging her love wherever she would go.

: :

Ironically, now that she wanted to shut out all news about the dead body, Lisa found herself forced to take part in the events. It wasn't later than next day that after a meeting, Keefe asked her to stay in his office for a few minutes. As she sank into the chair on the other side of his desk, she knew it couldn't be about anything else but the dead body.

Somewhere in the back of her mind where she regarded herself with brutal honesty, Lisa recognized her complete reluctance to connect the body with _him_.

"I'm sure you've already heard the news about the corpse they found." Keefe opened a folder, pulling out a paper that looked like a snapshot from where she was sitting. "I'd like you to take a look at it."

Lisa had jumped to her feet before she knew it. "No. I…" she swallowed around the wild throbbing of her heart that had crept up her throat. "I don't want to identify it."

"You don't have to. Actually, you wouldn't be able to," Keefe smiled at her weakly, with polite assurance. "There are no disfigured body parts on the picture. It's nothing too horrific. Please, take a seat, Lisa."

She plopped back into the chair. The picture Keefe pushed toward her was a close-up of the mid-part of a body, a large-scale enlargement that showed the area from knees to the abdomen.

"I could recognize the clothes, that's all. But it doesn't mean too much," Keefe said.

Lisa leant over the picture, resting her forehead in her palms as she placed her elbows on the desk. She remembered those clothes. Remembered when he stood there all dressed up that morning; their last morning. One hand could be seen beside the body. It was balled into a fist, and her heart clenched at the idea how great pain could cause that. She had to blink back the tears that suddenly threatened to swarm her eyes. She remembered the watch, too. Actually, Keefe wasn't right. She would have been able to identify his body from merely looking at his hand, at his nails, round and very male, the creases of his knuckles, the ginger hair creeping up to the back of his hand, the spots where the dog had bitten him. She stooped closer. The blowup was a bit blurry, the skin dirty and spotted with blobs of cement. Lisa wished she had a magnifying lens to see the bite marks. Or rather, on second thought, she was grateful she didn't have it.

"You see something?"

"The Longines," she forced out, not feeling confident about telling Keefe how much she knew his hands. It would sound more than suspicious.

"His watch?"

All Lisa could do was nod.

"Could you please recall where exactly he was shot in the leg?"

Lisa swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry as she was forced to remember a day she wanted to forget the most. She pressed her eyes shut, keeping the tears at bay. It was easy to recall: she lightly touched him there, stealing a few drops of his blood with the sleeve of the sweater she still kept under her bed like a morbid talisman.

"The same place," she mumbled after a short glance at the picture. "The dark blur on the right leg. That was it."

Keefe pulled the picture away from her and placed it back in the folder. "Thank you, Lisa, I really appreciate it. There's not much we can do at this point. Soon the result of the DNA test will be available and it will clarify a lot of things."

Keefe was right. The results arrived two days later. And they did clarify a lot of things.

: :

"Yes?" asked the intent male voice on the other end of the line.

Checking if the door to his study was properly closed, Michele answered. "I thought you might be pleased to hear that Jackson Rippner was declared dead yesterday."

"Oh." Weightless silence, maybe of relief or surprise, but definitely of satisfaction, lingered in the air.

"They found him in a construction area near Baltimore five days ago. A few well-placed bullets in the head, just as expected."

"Good."

"Want me to send the pictures?"

"Should I?"

"A real mess, believe me… A masterpiece of the Cleaner." Clearing his throat, Michele remarked with a hint of emphasis. "Finally, it's over now."

Paper rustling could be heard as on the other end of the line a FedEx folder was opened, and two A4 pictures fell out. The woman in them looked composed, apathetic. But for those who could see through even the meticulously built fronts, it was obvious she was hiding something. Both pictures were close-ups, showing her getting into a black Toyota on a particularly windy day. The second had her turned toward the camera, and one look in her eyes betrayed her. It was clear she was miserable.

The satisfied smile was apparent even through the slight static of the line. "Maybe, maybe not. I'm checking your mail right now. I see, you have everything, address, daily routines. Truly satisfactory."

Not really referring to the remark, Michele frowned. "I don't think it's a good idea."

"Good thing I don't ask for your approval."

The haughty tone clients usually used, and it made Michele roughly rub his temple. He had to be weather-sensitive; that, or these dealings were giving him a headache.

"The company won't be pleased. If I am not mistaken, there was an agreement-"

"I don't care about any agreements."

"She should be left alone. I don't think there's any point-" Michele argued but was cut short.

"There is. She's too close to the wrong company. One careless word, one too many questions in the wrong place… sooner or later it gets, _she_ gets dangerous."

"It's like stirring up a hornet's nest which is the Keefe case."

"No, it's tying up loose ends."

Irritated by the fact that it was like talking to walls, Michele commented. "She isn't a loose end anymore."

"That's what I have to find out."

: :

First she didn't spot the envelope. She almost stepped on it on her way to the living room.

It had been a very long Monday, she was sleepy and fatigued, just like in the previous three weeks. The light fixture in her tiny hall didn't work. She had asked the janitor to fix it but so far there was no progress in that matter, so she usually went for the one in the living room. The mid-December sun had long set, and the streetlamps outside couldn't illuminate the apartment properly.

She halted in the entrance to the living room, and stared into the semi-darkness before her. She was no more than two steps from the light switch, and it seemed a very long distance now, when two different things made a meteor-heavy fall in her mind. As she bent down for the small, thick, nondescript envelope that had no address written on it, she realized it had been lying a few steps away from the entrance, and there was no way someone could slip it in under the door so far.

In the exact same moment, she sensed it. Another presence in the apartment. It was a lingering sensation, something akin to feeling the prickle of someone's gaze at the back of the head. It made her hair stand on end.

Lisa took a step back, held her breath. Her heart raced ten times faster than her thoughts. She tried to fight the not so paranoid idea: whoever had placed the envelope on the floor was still there. Her fingers clawed around the thick paper cover so vehemently that her nails tore it open. Slowly, keeping her eyes on the ink-blue frame of the windowpane opposite her, Lisa pulled the contents out. In the dark, she was able to determine that it was a stack of stiff papers. Her free hand reached out toward the short chest she kept her shoes in, trying to find something she could use as a weapon. Keys, fly papers of pizza delivery, gloves. Nothing useful. The instinct to run was so strong that her knees seemed to wobble.

She took another step backwards.

Then let out a muffled cry when a sudden noise erupted behind her.

She swirled around in panic. It took three horrific seconds to realize that someone had knocked on the door. In a rush of relief that she wasn't alone anymore, Lisa tore the door open – the gut-wrenching realization that she hadn't checked who was on the other side came to her only belatedly.

Fluorescent light poured in, making her furiously blink against it. She focused her gaze, and let out a relieved sigh.

It was Mrs. Higgins, the old lady whose apartment was opposite her on the other side of the narrow landing.

"Lisa, my dear, I just heard you arrived home," she gave a wrinkled smile to her. Lisa's was trembling around the corners.

_Heard… or rather, saw_, she thought wryly. The old woman had the bad habit of standing before the peephole for hours, checking on the people who happened to go by on the other side of her door.

"Yes, I did." Lisa clutched at the doorframe, fighting the urge to look behind her back. Mrs. Higgins had no such intention, as she stared with a puzzled expression in her apartment.

"Why's it so dark in there?"

"There's a problem with the light in the hall. I've already told Mr. Novak, but he's yet to come and fix it."

"I'll tell Adam to haul his old limbs up here and check it."

Lisa smiled thankfully though somewhat shakily. Mr. Novak and Mrs. Higgins were in good terms; Lisa considered them as part of the fixed assets of the apartment building, considering they had been living here long before she was even born.

This was when Lisa remembered the package of paper she was still keeping a firm hold around. She gave it a stealthy glance, and her stomach dropped.

It was her personal travelogue of postcards she'd picked up from places they'd touched during their journey. She remembered she'd kept the stack in the leather bag the men, who'd hurled her from the motel, took with them in an attempt to clean everything off their trace. She turned the cards. There was no note, not a single word attached to or scribbled on them. She looked at the one on the top, and she felt like crying. A black and white postcard of Frederick, Maryland, the last station of the journey. The place where he kissed her. The place where he left her. She remembered picking it up on her way back to the motel after lunch – just before she was abducted. It seemed so unreal now.

She stroked the edges of the postcards delicately, almost affectionately. How and why did they end up on her floor?

Her heart, hibernated in the previous weeks, now thumped wildly in her chest. It couldn't be interpreted any other way than a warning: we know who you are; we are coming.

"Lisa, dear? Are you all right?"

Her head perched up, and Lisa blinked at the old woman in mild bewilderment. "Yes, sorry. It's been a long day."

The ominous silence and darkness behind her back were growing increasingly heavy by the second. Her mind raced. Maybe this was her chance to ask for help. Mrs. Higgins would be more than happy for the first-hand adventure that could feed the rumor-channel for at least a week.

"I just wanted to come and see if everything was alright."

Alarmed, Lisa asked. "Why do you ask?"

"There've been a few strangers lurking around here in the last couple of days."

"Strangers?" she echoed hollowly. Mrs. Higgins flooded her with her old woman smell as she leant closer in a conspiratorial manner.

"Yes. Just last Tuesday, I happened to see a man coming up here and standing before your door for a few good minutes. He had a very suspicious face, if you ask me. The dictionary definition of criminal. I was really worried that night. I put a chair against the door from the inside. You know, to hear if an intruder tried to get in."

"I don't know who it was," Lisa mumbled half to herself.

"No wonder, my dear, I don't think you know such people." Mrs. Higgins' voice turned into a whisper. "And just today. There was another man. I was about to walk Crunchy when I saw him standing by your door. I asked him flat out what he wanted. He made Crunchy very nervous. You know how he gets all worked up by strangers."

Lisa bit back a moan. Crunchy was Mrs. Higgins' annoying little Yorkshire terrier who barked even if a mosquito happened to fly by. "And what did he say?"

"He said her was searching for the Fischers."

"Oh," Lisa breathed, releasing a small smile. "Probably he's just missed the floor. The Fischers are living one floor above us."

"Probably," the old woman concluded with a frown that told Lisa otherwise.

Lisa risked a glance in her apartment, trying to make out if anything was out of place, but what she could see appeared normal and untouched, and there was nobody in the part of the living room the light in the landing could illuminate. Lisa shortly pondered if she should get her mobile from her bag she'd left on a chair in the hall, and call the police.

"Are you going home for the holidays?"

"Yes, yes, I'm planning to," Lisa answered somewhat distractedly. "My flight in scheduled for Saturday."

"That's a perfect timing. I'm baking gingerbread on Friday. I'll bring you a box. I like them the best when freshly baked."

"Thank you, Mrs. Higgins, but really, it's not necessary."

There was a roll of barks resounding in the landing, and the old lady hurriedly scuffled toward her door, leaving a pretty disturbed Lisa frozen to the threshold in fearful anticipation.

"I can't make Crunchy wait too long. Talk to you later, dear." And with that, she disappeared in her apartment.

Slowly, Lisa turned toward hers. Numbly, she closed the door and leant against it. The feeling was akin to stepping in a lion's lair. The least she could do was not putting the safety chain in place.

Was this a coincidence, these strangers around her apartment, or the product of an old, crotchety hag's imagination in override? Was this really a warning, a threat? A reminder that they knew where she was? That they were keeping an eye on her? That they would eventually come and get her?

The fact that someone had intruded her apartment and left her the travelogue that was last in the possession of people who were responsible for the assassination attempt on Keefe's life, the people who made a meek promise to leave her alone, gave her every right to call the police. She should have, she knew it, but the chance that it was only a warning and she was alone now made her hesitate. After all, why leaving the travelogue to alarm her, if they were here to kill her right away?

Lisa groaned inwardly. The last thing she needed right now was making a fool out of herself in front of the police, the neighbors, and, she had no doubt it would spread that far, in front of Keefe's whole department.

And still, as she reached the doorway between the hall and the living room, more than any time before, she could feel someone watching her. She placed the travelogue on the chest, and groped about for the umbrella she kept hanging above it. Behind the half-drawn curtains, the distorted rectangle of the window was now a shade deeper blue as it grew darker outside. Lisa frowned. She was almost sure that she'd opened the curtains fully in the morning. She usually did.

There, in the thick darkness in the corner, the shadows seemed to gather into a misshapen form, maybe a human body, and Lisa strained her eyes. From that spot, an- imagined or real- stare was burning a hole into her.

Lisa inhaled deeply, then exhaled silently. An unidentified feeling surged through her, unexpectedly soothing the quivers of her stomach.

Her hand reached toward the switch, and she flicked it. The momentary blindness lasted for only a fraction of a second, and she stared, with slightly burning eyes, at the spot where just a minute earlier she'd visualized someone hiding.

It was only her standing lamp, nothing else.

A nervous laugh started to emerge in her chest as she stood there, confused.

"Wrong direction."

Lisa jumped at the sudden voice, and whirled to the right toward its source, briefly acknowledging how her heart had just stopped beating – not out of dread though, but mind-numbing disbelief. This voice could not be mistaken, not even if its appearance here went against everything rational and sound and plausible.

Among many other things at the moment, it surprised, even angered her how close he'd been able to creep without her noticing it. He was standing not more than three steps away from her, casually leaning against the wall.

Incredulity wrapped around her tightly, squeezing the air out of her. Squeezing all thoughts out, too.

_Jackson._ Her heart jostled around in her chest at the sight of him.

_He's alive_, her mind concluded the obvious.

Her body shuddered with the almost irrepressible urge to hug him, but she was frozen to the spot, washed away by a tidal wave of different emotions. It drowned her; she gulped for air, unable to differentiate one feeling from the other.

But more than anything else, she felt cheated. Somehow, in that minute, the utter misery of the previous weeks, every teardrop and every nightmare seemed ridiculous and fake, his appearance here was somehow mocking them.

"Hi, Leese," he said with an easy smile that was bordering on gentle and arrogant – he'd always been the master of that. Lisa, in her utter shock, fancied the smirk concealed razor-sharp awareness, and was a bit wolfish, too. "Would've thought you had a better security system. After all the things you've been through."

Lisa wanted to retort but her tongue was bound.

He was alive, and funnily, what should have made her overjoyed, ended up being the reason for her reluctance to pick up everything just where they'd left it. People didn't usually return from death. Lisa was cautious and suspicious enough to understand there was more to the whole flow of events than she'd ever suspected. The air of deception was lingering around him. Also, she was too sober to assume he showed up here only because he'd wanted to see her. Sentimentalism had never been the word to describe him.

His clear, unwavering gaze dropped to her hand, and he smirked, not without the hint of irony.

"So this time it's an umbrella? How original."

The sarcastic reminder about the object she was still gripping served as a wake-up signal, and Lisa, fueled with the adrenaline still galloping in her limbs, the dread that hadn't been released, and a bitter revenge she didn't have an explanation on, swung the umbrella, aiming at his head. She was satisfied that it apparently took him completely by surprise – it wasn't only him who could achieve that. Thanks to his sharp reflexes, in the very last moment he blocked the hit with his forearm.

She remarked haughtily, though her head was still reeling after the heavy jolt of relief and shock, "I could beat you with it anytime, Jackson."

He grabbed the umbrella, and with a rough pull, he jerked her closer to him. His free hand pinched her chin as he drawled with a slight grin. "I was starting to think the cat got your tongue, Leese."

Lisa studied him through the thick fog that suddenly seeped in her mind at his proximity. Now that she stood so close to him, and his scent engulfed her and wrapped her mind softly, Lisa realized her subconscious had recognized it lingering in the room, and it'd given her that unexpected feeling of calmness a few minutes earlier – all those weeks beside him, it somehow became a part of her, like her own scent: a feel of familiarity, security.

But it could easily be deceiving. With him, many things usually were.

His fingers against her chin were firm but soft, leaving a blazing hot spot behind. For a moment he looked almost timidly gentle before the self-assured smirk returned on his face.

"You know, I bet you could beat me with this umbrella. The question is: _would_ you do it?"

Lisa frowned with sudden resentment at the cocky, utterly confident gleam on his face. "If it is necessary. Tell me, is it necessary now, Jackson?"

He didn't answer. There was a falter in his manner, like a power cut during transmission, a moment of uncertainty – maybe a moment of second-guessing. He tossed his head back and gave her a penetrating glance from under half-closed lids; the long lashes cast a shadow on his eyes, obscuring them. She hated when he looked at her like that, with calculating, cold objectivity. From behind a banister of superiority. She couldn't decide if it was act now or he was a threat on her.

Lisa took a step back, a casual one as if by putting space between them, she could distance herself from the situation and look at it with clear head.

Her stomach constricted with bitter worry. Was the Keefe case still an unfinished job for him?

"Why are you here?" she demanded steadily.

Jackson let out a short laugh that was clapping among the walls harshly. The glare he was giving her was steely. "What a warm welcome!"

Squaring her shoulders, Lisa stated. "Just what an intruder deserves, I guess."

He closed the distance she'd just put between them in an instant, and Lisa flexed her muscles to keep her body in place. There was a line, a chisel-engraved hard line just beside his nose Lisa always identified with his unpredictable temper; like a blinking red warning light, it always made her shrink away from him.

Jackson leant close to her, easily, naturally invading her personal space.

He observed her crossly. His smile was strange, deformed – he still wasn't conscious of what exactly distorted it. Sometime in the previous weeks- in his constant double-checking with reality while trying to prove himself right in things he didn't really want to be right, dissuading himself from pursuing something that didn't fit with anything he'd grown used to-, he'd become like a sick, rabid dog that retches up its guts' contents and wallows in its own dirt. He leant to her ear, hating her for the almost imperceptible undulation of her shoulders, the slight quiver of her body – hating himself for stimulating it. This was, too, one of those things that could easily be labeled as self-torture – when he stabbed her, with that move, he stabbed himself twice as hard.

"Oh, you're afraid of me, aren't you, Leese?"

Lisa glared at him from the top of her eyes. His voice was the devil's hiss, soft as a whisper and vile. The words tickled her skin and her nerves, too. Jabbing her fingers in his chest, she pushed him away.

"Should I, Jackson?"

"You tell me."

Lisa scrutinized his face anxiously, followed the lines she fancied she knew better than anyone in this world. On a certain level, it was not possible anymore to face him with the old bone-freezing fear, but something in his manner was still very much disconcerting.

His gaze was guarded, veiled – never before had it hurt her more than now.

Now that he'd changed her, but obviously he hadn't changed himself. It let Lisa think yet again that the world had moved on, only she was still standing there, stuck in her own fantasy land. It forced her to ask the question if she'd been sentimental and foolish again, attaching too many emotion-driven wishes to something that had never been meant to be more than what it was: a moment of unleashed physical need – he'd kissed her because he felt like so, not because on a mysterious, sentimental level they'd connected. She'd been told many times that men worked in a very simple way; there was no need for combinatory theories about their acts.

Slipping out of the cage-like space he left for her between his body and the wall, Lisa sauntered a few steps away from him with her back turned – the simple act required more bravery than it was natural, and she lamented the old easiness she'd gained around him during their journey and now seemed to have lost in the previous minutes. His silence was, more than anything else, unsettling.

Jackson didn't move from the wall. Lisa placed the umbrella on the coffee table. She slipped out of her shoes, slowly shrugged out of her coat. The silence between them was almost formal as Jackson studied her, and Lisa studied him in return. For the first time since he'd showed up here, she let her eyes roam his form. He looked almost the same, only his hair was shorter in his forehead, neatly cropped in the back, with the part moved in the middle. Also, she had the inkling it was one shade or two darker than she remembered – or probably only his skin had picked up a fair, unhealthy tone.

There was a strange smile tugging at the corner of his lips Lisa had trouble to interpret. Something shifted in the atmosphere around them, and with her usual intuition, she sensed the undesired animosity draining, but it left a muddy, sticky substance behind.

"Nice to see you," she announced with a measured tone, not without the hint of accusation she wasn't even aware of.

Something clouded his face for a moment, then a blink of uncertainty in his eyes as he nodded. "Thank you."

She didn't ask stupid questions, naïve questions, questions she'd have asked a few months back, as to how he could find her, if he'd been following her again, how he could get in. She didn't mention either that she thought he was dead. They were far beyond being so clichéd.

Jackson pushed himself away from the wall, and started a slow circle in the living room, glancing around with the polite interest of someone in an art gallery. Lisa, in a matter of a split second, easily caught the slight, almost imperceptible limp in his gait.

"How's your leg?"

With a soft smile, he squinted at her. "Better, thank you. The bullet didn't reach the bone, but I won't be jogging anytime soon."

He stroked a finger along the windowsill like he was checking if it was dusty. He cleared his throat.

"To be honest, your apartment surprised me. It is pretty impersonal. Very Spartan."

Lisa looked around as if it was the first time she realized the same. A considerable stack of closed cardboard boxes was still piled against the far wall of the living room, and she knew the bedroom looked even worse. She'd opened only the boxes with her clothes and necessities, for practical reasons. Except for a few plates and mugs, the kitchen was empty. This was the first time she realized the apartment looked more like a crypt.

"I haven't unpacked everything yet."

Jackson examined her from the other side of the room. He was outside of the meager glow of the track lights on the ceiling. The ghostly street lights smeared a blue highlight over his jawline as he stood with his back against the window. Lisa felt herself trembling, as if struck by a wave of aftershock, completely overtaken by his mere presence. She tried to make her eyes get used to him standing among these walls. She ran her gaze along his figure, the crisp dress shirt and tailor-made suit pants, his hands in his pockets – the manager-attire, manager-posture. Was this the same man she'd been mourning? The same she'd kissed?

Or the same she'd feared?

He cocked his head, lifting his unusual gaze at her face. "And why's that? Don't feel at home?"

Lisa hugged herself. Of course. This was the same man who knew her better than anyone. Probably even better than she knew herself.

She hadn't been able to find her way home for quite some time now.

"Maybe," she replied, not keen on elaborating any further right now. She leant against the back of the couch between them – maybe for support, maybe to barricade herself from the complicated feelings he was evoking in her again.

"I have to apologize but had to go through your stuff. Federal departments have the bad habit of keeping close eye on their employees."

"Oh, they do, _too_?" her tone was less biting than intended. She nipped her lower lip bitterly. "And?"

"And either Keefe's a decent guy or you're above all suspicion." As an afterthought, Jackson added with a skew smirk. "I'd vote for the second."

If it was a relief, she didn't show it.

"What happened, Jackson?"

He laughed, though Lisa could tell, not without tension. "Oh, all business immediately. Where's my people-pleaser Lisa? You haven't even asked if I was thirsty."

"You really think you can play this game with me?" Lisa sighed. "You didn't come here to mock me."

Almost solemnly, he admitted. "No, I didn't. And I'm not playing games either."

Suddenly, he skirted the couch and stepped to her. With the back of his fingers, he stroked her face, eyes intent on hers, losing any edge it might have held before. She'd never suspected she would miss his unsettling scrutiny, but right now his glance gave her the feel of home more than any items in the apartment could achieve.

"I'm not here to hurt you. You know that, right?"

He was familiar now, and excitingly close. In a second, he'd transformed back into the man who could wash away all her coherent thoughts by a simple hug. She couldn't attach ill thoughts to this side of him. Not when he looked at her like that, with so much caress melting the wintry blue of his eyes; with the faint hurt in his voice that was almost impossible to catch.

"Yes, I know," she mumbled.

The smile on his lips was feeble but honest. His fingertips glided down on the edge of her jaw, and back up again.

"You look tired."

"I _am_ tired," Lisa whispered. Her gaze was deep, feverish. Her skin was burning where he'd just touched her.

Lisa placed a palm on his chest, in an uncertain manner to feel his heart. It was beating in synch with hers. Her hand skimmed down, and she hesitantly fumbled with his shirt at the waistline, as if trying to convince herself that she was allowed to hug him; then with a swift motion, she slipped into his arms. She buried her face in his shirt. It was him, really him, the same scent, same warmth, same feel her body couldn't seem to forget. Just now, when she hugged him, did she let herself believe he really was there.

"That makes two of us," he murmured against her hair, closing her in his embrace. "I'm drained."

Or rather he'd been up to this moment. Now standing in her apartment, with her nose pressed against the scar on his neck, he felt everything but. Her scent soothed him in a way he'd never expected. Her fingers ran their usual, old course on his back, inflicting slowly gurgling desire in the pit of his stomach.

Lisa lifted her head, brushing the bridge of her nose along his throat. She followed the same path with her lips, just lightly, timidly, as if by accident. She exhaled against the tiny freckles on his neck, and smiled against them as he gulped. She wanted to kiss him, but wasn't sure if she could. If she _should_, to begin with.

Leaning away as much as he let her, she looked in his eyes. "Are you… are we in danger?"

Jackson stared back at her incredulously, and once again, his gaze was open. "You think I'd be here if I was? You think I'd endanger you?"

There was no answer to that, no answer to his glare but a smile that spread more in her chest than on her face. The world had turned upside down but it felt more right than ever before.

Lisa hid in his arms and didn't ask anything, because with infallible inkling she felt she wouldn't like whatever he had to say.

Without words, everything was peaceful and simple.


	16. A tiger's stripes

**A/N: **I know it was an awful long wait but here's the final chapter. I hope it's not so far from the quality of the previous chapters, it wasn't an easy one. Sorry if I disappointed anyone. There's a pretty personal part toward the end, I hope it didn't turn out unbearably emotional.

And now that it's over, I would like to thank it first of all to my amazing beta, Evelyn Benton: the last chapters would've been disastrous without you! Thanks for your support and constructive, honest comments!

Also thanks to my biggest fan, Iseebutterfly: I'm sure you like/know this story more than I do:D

And thanks to all my readers who followed this story to the end. Your comments, even your story alerts mean a lot to me! Kudos.

* * *

**Chapter 16: A tiger's stripes**

Fragments of peaceful moments, colorful mosaics on a dull, grey day. Moments they shared, ordinary, banal moments. Waking together. Preparing for the day. Bustling in the kitchen. Always touching. Always watching the other. Lisa collected them, filed and put them away for their beauty, because they were precious, these pearls of everyday life with him – they rolled away in million directions and gleamed in her chest, ebony-clean, gem-exquisite. A garland of picture-perfect harmony. She sorted out the rough ones with great care and locked them up, the obscure and nicked ones, uncomfortably uneven ones, those intermissions with far too many far too awkward questions, because she wanted to cope with them only later. She needed a little lie, innocent self-deception, just this once.

Jackson settled in with natural ease. He didn't bring much, just a leather bag that he kept in her bedroom upstairs. An item that should have appeared so out-of-place, but somehow Lisa found no trouble in considering it the part of her apartment.

Her best sleep in the past months, even years, had always been by his side, so Lisa wasn't surprised that she woke up well after ten o'clock next morning. They had fallen asleep on the couch the night before, Lisa still in her work clothes, entangled with Jackson in a comfortable, leisurely intimate embrace. She thought back at times, nights and mornings in strange motel rooms and different cities, his other hugs, the touches they'd stolen from the other and concealed as something without significance. Their history of physical awareness. Was this any different now, something meaningful? She couldn't help wondering, and the mere possibility frightened and excited her at the same time, and she had to order her body to stay in place and not escape at first instinct. She definitely wasn't ready for anything more physical with him. The idea that he might expect something more from her at this point worried her.

But he knew her, her past, had to understand. If nothing, the thought that she could be honest to him about it was enough comfort.

Jackson had his fingers weaved through her locks. It felt almost natural now. She closed her eyes and relaxed. His presence wrapped around her whole being like a blanket, the rhythmical rise and fall of his chest beneath her head numbed her mind.

"You know, this was the first night you didn't try to knock me out with a right hook. Does this mean we reached a new level in our relationship?" he whispered, a hint of tease lacing his voice, but underneath Lisa could detect something else; something soft, almost dreamy.

She chuckled into the folds of his shirt, and raised her head, wishing to see the softness, the same sparkle of humor lighting his eyes that brightened the tone of his voice. He was watching her lazily, his eyes two pale slits under the ginger lashes.

The fact that he called whatever they were having _our relationship_ lit up in her and smoldered like a beacon, drawing her close to its warmth. She stored it cautiously for further relish, and didn't comment on it, fearing his reply would crush this newest treasure in her. She wasn't even sure he was conscious of what he'd just said; he could easily react in an unpleasant way – Lisa knew him that much, knew his unpredictability.

Her words came slurring through the lingering haze of sleep as she remarked. "I've always been nice to guests, in case you've forgotten?"

His chest rumbled softly as he spoke, resonated through her whole being. "You usually sleep with them on the same couch?"

"Every single day." Lisa snaked her arms under his back, and squeezed him playfully. "So don't think you're special."

He smiled. "Nah, it'd be against my humble personality."

Despite that the heat was on, the apartment felt cold when Lisa left the confines of the couch. She briefly wondered if it had to do anything with the more and more natural sensation of physical contact with him. And also, if she'd grown dependent of it. It worried her a bit.

Not feeling prepared to face Keefe just yet, Lisa called in sick. It wasn't her first lie to him, but she had the feeling that now that Jackson was "alive" again, it wouldn't be the last time either. She got the rest of the week off – it was Keefe's Christmas present; the holidays were already in the weekend.

She watched Jackson from her place on the edge of the bathtub, and smiled around the toothbrush in her mouth. Jackson smirked at her around his, pacing up and down leisurely, and Lisa was afraid her heart would swell and burst open, because the feeling, the whole mundane scene with the underlying fact that a man, _this_ man could be the part of her life, and that he might stay for another teeth-brushing, coffee-drinking morning, and another, made her stomach construct with a mixture of indefinable emotions from dread to pleasure. Jackson squinted at her, leant in and gave her a white-foamed, mint-flavored quick kiss. She chuckled, and wanted so much just to pull him in a hug and stand there forever.

He put on the coffee while she took a shower and changed. The kitchen was almost empty, the cupboards, drawers, the counter top. A box of teabags and a pack of coffee were all he could find. He wondered if the only thing she lived on these days was caffeine.

She arrived on cue, as if the smell of coffee lured her from upstairs, her steps light, dancing. It made him smile that she didn't choose to wear sweatpants like he knew she usually would. He stared, eyes glazing, as he committed into memory the airborne flow of her skirt around her knees as she descended the stairs. He had many of these image fragments of her stored in his mind. They kept him awake at nights as he flipped through them, relishing each, one by one, like watching a magic lantern posture images on the walls of his consciousness. It was his personal mental diorama he used as entertainment.

Lisa had to dig out her kitchen supplies from the bottom of the cardboard boxes to prepare something to eat. Pans, plates, cutlery. Jackson was wondering if she ever planned to unbox her stuff, or felt she'd have to be ready to run away any minute. If she actually _wanted_ to do so. She was stuck in transit, on this in-between land, not on the road anymore but not yet completely arrived to a safe haven, and he knew he had a big part in it. In her homelessness. In _his_ homelessness, too.

There were only two mugs in her cupboard. Jackson assumed the chipped LisAtlantic was for her personal use, so he pulled out the Starbucks Washington mug, clearly a new addition to her collection. He smirked. Oh, his Starbucks-girl. Caffé latte-girl. No sugar, no shitty syrup or crème, just the classical, traditional version. He was sure she still went for that. He'd seen her do that many times back in Miami. Every single Wednesday. She needed this little incentive in the middle of those long weeks at the Lux to make her go on.

He'd also heard her giving the same fake name, average, forgettable name (had she consciously chosen the No.1 popular one in the US?) to the guys behind the counter; a little too embarrassed in the end, when they started to recognize her and scribbled her supposed name on her paper cup. It was typical of her, being always impossibly cautious and reserved.

He lifted the mug. "They still call you Mary here in Washington, too?"

Lisa looked at him, a bit awkwardly but not because she had to face again how much he knew about her: the way he usually mentioned it, like it was natural and normal that he'd obtained all these details by following her, always managed to throw her off a bit. And the fact that he'd known her for longer than she'd known him. She wasn't sure she could ever get used to it – the idea made her head spin a bit because it suggested she assumed they had a future together. _You're crazy_. And she really thought she was in a way. It wouldn't work. _Shouldn't_ work.

But when she replied, there was a smile around her lips, a bit proud, a bit secretive smile. "No. It's Lisa."

She didn't see his expression, she was too caught up in hiding hers. Plain things, simple accomplishments left him much more in awe than world-shaking gestures and big words.

When she put the pan on the stove, Lisa caught the little evil glint in his eyes, and stole the question from his lips. "No, not scrambled eggs. I had enough of them for a lifetime."

This time she looked at him because it was just as much his moment as hers, and she wanted him to understand it. All those occasions, his untamed, lecturing words, the concave mirror he held in her face to show her what she'd been doing to herself was much worse, a greater tragedy than anything that had happened to her resulted in her wishing to change it. Ever since then, Lisa couldn't study her life in any other way than through that distorted image in his mirror, and she didn't like it, the magnified barriers she'd built around herself. The things outside the barriers she'd relinquished. It's not that it was the first time she grew conscious of their existence; it was the first time they annoyed her with lying in her way. It was a long road ahead, but at least it was a leap, and Lisa wanted him to see her flight.

Jackson was pretty sure he had something almost solemn in his gaze as he studied her, the determined lines of her shoulders, the unwavering realization he'd fought so hard to put in her eyes, to make her see, to make her understand. He wanted to think it was a bit his doing. Something unselfish, pure. In his outright honesty, he realized it might be the closest he'd ever get to redemption. And that made him question what exactly he was doing there, in the middle of her kitchen, standing there in socks, in coffee-steam and radio chart-leisure; if actually what he wanted, creepy or sick or absolute clichéd, was this purity. _Her_ purity. To steal some of it, to bath in it and make himself believe he could still be ransomed.

And most importantly, if this was the only reason why he pursued this – pursued something utterly illogical and false. Something destined to _not_ work. If it wasn't, all in all, selfishness again to save himself. Or selfishness to satisfy something he wasn't even conscious of, driven by something he _felt_ for her. He cringed at the thought, at what it implied, the chains, the exchange of trust, the undesired questions of social life that always waited for answers.

He wasn't really able to figure out why he suddenly felt he had to be saved, to begin with. It had never been part of his thoughts, his ego that was absolutely convinced there was nothing to change about his life. At least, up till that fateful summer. He wasn't comfortable with any of this.

And still, he stayed.

And still, she let him stay.

For a short time, for that day, they lived a secluded life, shut away from the real world like plastic figures in a snow globe. It was a mayfly day. Destined to be born, live and die in the course of a few hours.

: :

Neither of them showed inclination to leave the confines of the apartment and go to a restaurant, so they ate frozen dinners Lisa dug out of her fridge. It was turning dark when they finished. The snow outside was littering the streets with white papier-mâché cutlets.

The old phrase, however cliché, was true: every good thing comes to an end eventually.

Jackson could have bet it would come much sooner. It had been gathering and gathering behind her furtive glances, in the pause between two conversations, in the hesitation of movements when she thought he wasn't watching. Questions striving to be answered, guesses she couldn't suppress. He could see them unfold, one after the other. He was even amazed she could hold it back for so long. After all, Lisa was Lisa, with her endless questions and never shrinking curiosity.

It was their elephant in the room.

Lisa placed the last clean plate on the rack beside the sink, wiped her hands in the kitchen clothes, and said: "You know that eventually we have to talk about it."

When Jackson didn't answer, she turned toward him. Her gaze was soft but firm on his face, with that no nonsense touch to it he recognized from the times he'd tried to make her accept his bullshit replies and she'd always lash out, prompting an answer from him that he'd never planned to give. This was how they operated together.

"Tell me how you escaped."

He had the empty, diplomatic smile on his lips that she hated so much. Just as much as he hated her customer service-smile. Jackson leant against the kitchen counter, crossed his arms before his chest, and claimed:

"I'm not sure I want to talk about business with you right now, Leese."

"Why is it business? It's a simple question." Her stance mimicked his. She tilted her head and gave him the same piercing glance he used to. "Is there anything you can talk about with me? Because usually it doesn't seem so."

You built it for yourself, he told himself bitterly. He always preferred truth above half-truth and white lies, but his words felt heavy on his tongue now. Walking along a road he'd strived and planned so much to pave had never seemed so unpleasant. To her accusation, he announced evenly, fully aware that he was going to shatter the delicate house of cards they'd constructed. "I ordered them to kidnap you."

Her arms dropped. He didn't know but her heart did, too.

"What?" she whispered. "Why?"

The silence could have been challenging any other time, but Lisa sensed it was rather uncertain. His eyes flicked from her face to the scenery beyond the window, and back at her. He didn't really wish to witness it, the return of distrust and disappointment in her eyes at his words. So he didn't say anything. She was smart, though, she knew him that much, and said them for him.

"Tell me, Jackson. Did it go wrong in the end or it was just a sham? Was everything in the warehouse nothing more than just a preplanned show from beginning to end? Which one?"

"I think you already know the answer," Jackson said quietly. He couldn't be sure what was coming, the rate it was going to affect her, the magnitude of its destruction, but he already understood that the worst thing he could do to her was coming here. And not only to her, to himself, too. He should have simply stayed dead.

Brusquely, Lisa demanded. "Why?"

"So you would think I was dead. You would, everyone would."

Lisa turned away and stared out the kitchen window at the mess of whirling, dancing snowflakes on the other side of the glass. Inward, at the mess in her mind. She felt betrayed. The agony of that day at the warehouse, and those afterwards came back with full force. She'd cried her heart out for nothing. Momentarily, she was completely stupefied. She heard him stir behind her, his feet shuffle against the tile as he changed stance, but he didn't approach her, and suddenly she doubted he would ever understand how much his words hurt her. For him, it was just another plot, but for her, it was another occasion when life spat in her face.

"It was Plan B. I had it because I didn't trust the FBI, and I was right. When Carter got arrested, even though we'd agreed I would go under witness protection, they wanted to take me in. The official explanation was that I'd be in custody till the investigation was over and they were sure Carter was the right guy." He snorted. "They took me for an idiot. Such investigation would never be over, there would always be something they come up with just to keep me there. Besides, to be honest, I didn't have the intention to enter their stupid program and have the FBI sniffing around me all the time. So I ordered your kidnapping. This way I had a reason to get away, stating that I was the only one who could rescue you."

Jackson shifted his weight to his other leg. It unnerved him that Lisa was showing her back to him as she propped herself up against the kitchen sink. The streetlights lit up her hair, tuning up the red of her tresses, making her look like a moor pixie with her head on fire. He knew that inside she was already ablaze. Her voice, though, was low and measured, and he frowned at her with sudden unease as she spoke.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"No offence, Leese, but we know you're not the best actress. I needed you and the FBI to think I died."

A moment of silence ensued. Silence of disbelief, of bitterness. Almost as if talking to herself, Lisa asked quietly, with a barely perceptible hissing edge to her words. "Do you have any idea what I had to go through?"

"I specifically told them not to harm you."

She whirled around and glared at him. A short laughter escaped her lips, snapping sharply like the crack of a whip. The empty walls echoed it coldly. Her eyes flared up as blood rushed in her face. Jackson watched her with the curiosity of an alien.

"I'm not talking about that, you insensitive jerk!" she retorted. Her hand flew to her hair, raking it with barely suppressed frustration. She seemed to be restraining herself from an ugly lash-out, from revealing too much. "On the way to the airport, our last call, through the flight, the following days. Weeks. And then, just a few days ago when you were officially declared dead. You have no idea, Jackson."

Suddenly, Lisa wouldn't be able to tell who she was angrier with: herself or him. She shouldn't have been so surprised that he didn't manage to see beyond the direct, physical consequences of his acts. He was contradictory again; times when he could dissect her along the line of a foible, but other times, times like this, when there was nothing but a row of emotions to assort, he was blind.

Jackson studied her with mild puzzlement. There was so much poorly concealed pain in her voice that he stirred awkwardly again, though the feeling flooding his guts was burning hot and set his chest on fire, and he was selfish enough to relish in it: she'd been mourning him, he knew it for sure now.

"Lisa," face softening, he stepped closer to her, and though her whole posture, the crossed arms and furrowed brows shouted about her rage, he snaked his fingers in her hair, bent down and planted an affectionate kiss on her forehead. "I'm sorry. I had no idea."

Sulkily, she mumbled. "Of course you didn't. You have no heart."

Lisa slipped out of his arms, feeling her temper waver at his gentleness. For some reason, because it felt fair at that point, she held onto her anger, if nothing else, than out of tribute to the past misery she reckoned she had the right to. Suddenly, she remembered the sweater that she still kept under her bed, the sweater with his blood embroidered into its fibers. She'd cherished it like it was a relic. It felt ridiculously stupid now. How could she be such a moron to think he sacrificed his life for her?

"Were you really shot? Or was that fake blood?"

"No, actually, that asshole really shot me. I think he decided I deserved it."

Lisa perked an eyebrow. She couldn't help but feel a malevolent contentment spread within her but it was immediately tampered down as she recalled that moment in the warehouse, the fear, the shock, his palpable pain. Those were real and raw. Even its memory was too powerful.

"To be honest, at that point I seriously thought they had changed their minds and wanted to kill me."

Lisa frowned, and Jackson knew she would put two and two together without his further help. She was smart, only- ludicrously- unwilling to presume he could possibly go that far.

"Why were they willing to help you in the first place? You cooperated with Keefe on some level. Doesn't it qualify as betrayal in their eyes? That you are not trustworthy?"

"Not entirely." He hesitated. "Keefe got his man, true. But maybe not the right man."

Lisa was struck with shock. For a moment, she appeared to be completely speechless. He could literally see the whole picture fall apart and be put together again in her head to form something gruesome, something that disappointed her. Suddenly he hated that picture, though it was the truth. Though it was his doing.

Her voice was low and barely above a stunned whisper. It was an inner battle: wanting to ask and not to ask. "You say Carter is not the customer?"

"No. He's just a scapegoat."

"Oh my God…" Her hand flew to her mouth as she breathed, looking at him with the full knowledge of what he'd done.

"Don't worry, Leese, it won't be too difficult to dig up dirt on him. He has enough shit on his hands to deserve a little investigation. And sooner or later they will find out he had nothing to do with the Keefe case. But by then, they cannot retaliate against me since I'm dead."

The yellow highlight over her skin shifted to the patch of her neck above the shirt as her whole body jerked.

"How well planned," she drawled with sarcasm dripping from her words. Her eyes closed, and she half-hid behind her hands. _Just stop talking, please, stop talking._ With every word uttered, he was spiraling away from her, and in the chaos, Lisa couldn't tell if it was for the better or worse, but it hurt nonetheless.

"You have to know I'd achieved a respectably high rank at the company by the time we met. I had a good chance to be promoted when Henry would retire." Even to his own ears, his words seemed to pick up an apologetic tone he didn't really intend to use.

"Oh, believe me, I understand. You're playing with people's lives like they were billiard balls you can toss around anytime. Like they had no value, except for the profit you make out of them. If they can serve you, that's fine. If there's no use of them for you, then they're worthless."

"The thing is, this is how most people think."

"People like you."

"People in high positions. Legit positions. Politicians, businessmen. Those who rule this world."

She rolled her eyes. He rolled his. She picked up the role of the naïve girl again, probably because this is how she wanted to believe in the world around her, probably to annoy him. He shook his head.

"Anyhow, you cannot really think we'd betray a client. Our reputation would be shot to hell if the rumor says we handed over a customer in exchange of an agent of ours. Who'd feel safe enough and hire us if we were willing to rat them out anytime? The clients, their namelessness are our first priority."

"I feel sick."

"It's pure business," Jackson stated coldly. "This is how things work everywhere. We please customers. Isn't this what you were doing at the hotel?"

Lisa didn't even feel inclined to answer his challenge. Her stomach turned upside down from the way he used first person plural when he talked about the company. He was still the part of it, the very man she'd fought on the Red Eye and back at her father's house. She dipped her head back and rested it against the over-the-counter cupboard. From behind half-opened lids, through the distance his ice-cold, stone-hard practicality put between them, she blurted. "There was a body. A horribly disfigured dead man under a ton of hardened concrete. Who's he?"

Her heart skipped a beat because he apparently found difficulty in meeting her gaze.

"I don't know."

"You don't know. In your dictionary it means you don't care. That it doesn't matter." She slipped down along the counter into a crouching position on the floor. Her chest felt too tight. If she could, she would have cried right now, however pathetic it was. "He died just because you needed a dead body to make everyone think it was you? This is the case, Jackson?"

"I won't deny it," he stated flatly. He had never been that comfortable with the idea to mutilate someone just to conceal the physical differences between them – the other differences were taken care of: he'd changed his own hospital records, results of blood tests, fingerprints, even in the FBI database. In hindsight, he was grateful for his shot leg so he'd had a good excuse to stay clear when the execution happened. Out loud, he said: "He was a dead man anyway. There was an order out there for him. Two birds with one stone."

"You make me sick when you're like this." Lisa glared at him incredulously as he was standing there, in the middle of her kitchen, talking about people and their lives like they were model soldiers on a sand table. She fancied herself as one of them, and it hurt. _I don't want to know this man_, she thought desperately, but it sounded like a lie; or a half-serious wish. "Am I in danger from your precious company?"

"I already told you. No, you're safe."

"Mrs. Higgins next door said she'd seen some suspicious men lurking around my door…"

"Yeah, she met me yesterday. Last week, it was Luca. You remember him?"

She did. The Italian henchman with the face of the dictionary definition of a criminal, as Mrs. Higgins described the stranger. They met back in Illinois in the house of Jackson's friend, Michele ages ago.

"You had him following me?" she asked accusatorily, suppressing a shiver that she, just like last time, hadn't realized someone was monitoring her.

"No, not really." He cleared his throat, before adding: "I just wanted to get your new address. Wanted to know if you were okay."

"And? Am I?" she jeered bitingly.

After a short pause, after scrutinizing her with a soft yet sharp glance, Jackson gave a small shake with his head. "I wouldn't be here if you were."

Lisa had nothing to say to this. Whatever way he got his information from Luca about her, it was enough for him to know, to sense, even from hundreds of miles, how she felt. It should have scared her, but it didn't.

"So what are you gonna do now?"

His jaws flexed. In the ensuing silence, Jackson was debating with himself. There were several ways to go: the easy, the hard, the true and the dishonest. Flatly, curtly, he replied: "I guess what I'm the best at doing."

Lisa pressed her lips together so vehemently that her teeth screeched. She sensed he was going to keep things from her again, and she blatantly remarked, with the clear intention to hurt: "Like closed casket funerals?"

All he offered was a humorless laughter.

With an emotionless, official tone, she asked him point-blank. "Why are you here after all, Jackson?"

"According to the plan, I should have disappeared and laid low for a while."

As expected, he didn't give a straight answer. Lisa glared at him. "And?"

After a moment of awkward silence, he inquired. "What do you think?"

Just as coolly, Lisa stated, "I have no idea so you have to tell me."

Jackson soundly exhaled. She was matching him in stubbornness, all right. "You can't deny we got closer to each other during that month. Dammit, Lisa. You know very well that I want you."

The back of her head connected with the wooden cupboard as Lisa leant against it with an exasperated sigh. It was probably a confession she'd been waiting for, but it came now in the most unromantic moment possible, and she would have laughed bitterly if the whole inside out scene didn't suffocate her so much. It was incredible how her life was constructed from grotesque pieces of absurdities.

"And you well know how I hate what you do," she bit out. "Likewise you know that my boss is the man you just admitted you'd fooled. Really, Jackson, what do expect from me? To fall in your arms and be pliant?"

He smirked. "Sounds like a good enough plan to me."

Her hands landed on the tile with a loud snap as she leant forward angrily, and cursed. How could he not see what his acts evoked in her? That she couldn't take it lightly?

"You asshole. How could I look him in the eye knowing that you're alive and that he arrested the wrong man? You think I'd wake up in the morning, assist him, then come back into your bed? That's ridiculous. That's insane." Her back gave a hollow bang as she reclined against the counter with a furious huff. "I can't believe you did it again. You ruined my life, my job just like before."

"This is just a job, Lisa, don't be a drama queen," he chided her calmly, with a hint of cynical incredulity.

"Oh, really?" Lisa sneered. "If it's just a job, why don't you give up yours?"

"Recently, I have the same plan on my mind."

"Oh, of course."

Jackson sighed. The conversation was going in a very wrong direction. He sat down on the floor, opposite her, fighting back his temper. He pulled up his knees, and above his entwined fingers, gazed over at her. There was a small smile in the corner of his lips, a gentle yet mocking smirk that was way too alluring on his face for Lisa's liking at the moment. His voice rumbled softly as he spoke.

"Your surprise is intriguing. Quite ironic, if you think about it. Tell me something, Lisa. I fooled you or you fooled yourself?"

She locked her gaze with his. He was right again. He'd always been the same man, and she should have been aware of that. It wasn't his fault that along the line, it had become only secondary behind her feelings for him. She placed her chin on her forearms and scrutinized him with the blinking, reviving affection circulating in her veins. She didn't want it to lead her now, lead her somewhere she, later, might regret.

But he was still the same man. The same she'd fallen in love with.

The same who killed for money.

She'd thought she reconciled with this fact, but it wasn't that easy. Lisa knew, even if she could accept it, accept him the way he was, it'd always bother her. A splinter in her fingertip that would slowly fester.

She watched him against the background of the bluish rectangle the window projected on the wall, watched the heavy shadows settled in the creases and hollows of his face. The animated, vigilant genius in his eyes as the streetlights touched them sharply.

"So you won't be called Jackson Rippner anymore? It must be a strange feeling," she remarked drily, feeling a pang of sorry that his fake death could have meant a clean slate, new name, new identity. It should have come with a new life. It was a shame he didn't see it.

"It's just a name. I've used many aliases over the past years. It only adds another one to the list."

"But still. You don't feel a pang of… loss? Isn't this how you refer to yourself in your head?"

"I don't refer to myself in any way. That'd be mental," he smirked, amused. She was the emotional woman again, the one who could be sentimental about a chopped mug just because it reminded her of a fond memory.

With the same clinical tone he usually used, Lisa stated. "Thing is, you _are_ mental, Jackson… And don't play with me now, you know how I meant it. If you were woken up in the night and asked about your name, what would that be?"

"A raid?" he quipped. Seeing her frown, Jackson shrugged. "Depends on the job I'm working on at the moment."

"Ah, you are horrible!"

Lisa shook her head. It was just typical, always the professional, always the non-human about every other aspect of his own life. No attachments. Even if his own name was in question.

Jackson looked at her with the ghost of an amused smile, and remarked. "Lisa, Jackson Rippner _is_ an alias."

The silence surprised him; it was full of accusation and disappointment.

Her eyes wide under a deep frown, aghast, Lisa whispered. "It's not your real name?"

He had the nerve to chuckle. "It was specifically created for the Keefe job."

Through the sharp stab of hurt she didn't even try to analyze, Lisa snapped. "You're seriously fucked up in the head for coming up with a name like that."

"No more than you for not realizing it was fake."

Lisa rubbed her forehead. It felt like she didn't know this man before her, didn't know anything about him, and suddenly she realized it was more or less the case. She didn't even know his name. It'd been a long time she felt so vulnerable, so ridiculously an open book in front of someone, and through the hurt she felt at the moment, she realized, the last who looked through her defenses like that, from behind his own, was actually him.

He sensed her mood change but obviously didn't understand it, as his tone was soft but with a hint of impatience. "It's just a name. Why does it matter? It's still me."

"What's your real name then?"

Jackson didn't reply, only his brows lifted.

"Doesn't it disturb you?" Lisa exclaimed exasperatedly. "That I call you a name that's not yours?"

"It _is_ mine, Lisa. Just like the dozen others."

"But it's fake!"

Jackson was watching her intently, with the expression and understanding of a marble head sculpt, stone-like, unmoved. "Actually, I _am_ Jackson."

"But you said…" she mumbled, suddenly feeling deadly tired in the focus of his maze-like riddles. "You kept your first name? Why?"

"Remember your father's wallet? Joe Reisert, JR. I already had the J covered, so why changing it? And-" he stopped abruptly, a bit uncharacteristically lamely.

"And?" Lisa persuaded. He offered her an almost shy smile.

"I wanted you to call me on my real name. The one I refer to myself in my head," he added with a crooked smirk. "I had this idiotic impression that it was almost as if we were on friendly terms."

His face was soft, the edges of his mouth smooth. For a moment, she could see through his defenses, but she knew he and his masks were like a Matryoshka doll: when she removed the outer one, she had to find out there was yet another behind it, and so on again. Lisa knew the whole thing was just plain wrong and degenerate, but she couldn't help liking it. In his twisted way, it was as good as a love confession, a bit sick and very much abnormal, and she felt her heart respond to it.

"Whatever your new name would be, may I call you Jackson?"

He laughed softly. "Whatever you wanna call me. I might just keep the first name again. What d'you say?"

She laughed, too. It was so absurd, and yet, so normal in his, in _their_ world.

Jackson squinted at her snidely. "I'll stay with Thornton."

Lisa snorted, thinking back at his alias back in Miami, before all this had started. Cowboys, movies and John Wayne in a moon-grey Bentley speeding down on the Florida motorways. It felt like a century ago now. "Cole Thornton, the law-abiding citizen? How fitting."

The tension seemed to ease a little between them. Silence reigned the kitchen. It was increasingly hard to see clearly in the meager light. The sun set early, and the streetlamps couldn't properly illuminate her forth story apartment.

Lisa was lazily watching the light play with the color of his eyes. Ever-changing color. She was musing; glacier blue, cerulean, summer sky blue, flower petal blue, electric, laser sharp blue. She smiled at herself. As if by finding a proper name for that color, that particular tone, a name that would do him justice, she had a notion it would grant her the chance to unravel his gaze, and with that, unravel Jackson himself. You name it, you tame it.

If it were so easy! It was nothing but a desperate wish to get closer to him. Most probably, it was just as versatile as Jackson was, and she had to find a name for each emotion-induced color. The ninety-nine names of God. And she would never know what the hundredth was.

"How old are you?" she asked suddenly. Something so small, so basic, and she didn't even know the answer.

Jackson laughed. "What do you think?"

Lisa frowned, suddenly losing patience. Was he really skirting the topic again? "Right now? A six-year old?"

"Why is it important?"

"Why is it a secret? Are you older than me at all?"

"Of course, I am," he smirked.

"When is your birthday?"

"Lisa," he groaned. "What's this interrogation for?"

"Interrogation?" she snapped with an incredulous laugh. "Asking when you were born counts as interrogation? You have something seriously wrong with your head."

"I really can't see why it's important. You wanna buy me a pair of socks? Or a shirt with a matching tie?"

Lisa glared at him. His sarcasm was so thick, she turned away as if he had physically hit her. A dark feeling sank in her heart, and it whispered to her that she wanted something that didn't exist.

Jackson, sensing he had hurt her, sighed tensely. "May 25th. And I'm two years older than you. Two and a half, to be precise. Happy now?"

Lisa glanced at him for long, observing his face, assessing the emotions that formed the expression he was wearing.

"No, because you obviously don't understand."

She sounded so sad that the comment, that would normally trigger a snide or angry retort from him, left the words stuck halfway in his throat.

"For some reason you seem to think I'm asking you all these questions with some twisted purpose. I'm not spying on you, Jackson, I'm not collecting information that could be used against you later. It's a normal thing, that's what… people do."

She almost said it: couples. Almost. They were a far cry from that. They wouldn't ever be, she realized with a bursting heart. Not this way.

For once, he was quiet now. The shadows had deepened, only his eyes glinted almost eerily in the yellow hue hitting his face through the window.

"You know all those things about me. And I don't ask these questions just because it's fair that I get to know just as much about you. I ask them because I want to know you. The tiny details like this are just the part of it. Every human relationship requires a certain level of trust and confidence."

Her throat tightened. It felt like standing there naked. No guards, no lies, nothing. Just her heart, bare, laid out before him.

He was still silent, uncomfortable, and she knew, whatever would happen, this man had inflicted an irrevocable, irremediable hurt within her simply by existing, simply by being who he was. It shook her to the core, the fright, the fear that it would stay there forever.

"Oh, of course," she jeered with a mocking sneer, covering the raw flesh of her heart. "I forgot you're not cut out for this. Why exactly are you here then?"

Jackson stood up.

She stood with him, too.

His face was unreadable in the low light but she believed it would have been so anyway.

"Okay, I guess it's better if I leave now. There's no point in staying."

"Right, then go, I agree. Go before it turns out you have a past, a name, a family like other, normal people. Go before something personal slips from your mouth in exchange of all the things you know about me. God forbid that you'd open up a little and confide in me."

He brushed past her as he strode toward the stairs leading to the first floor. She scurried after him, staring at his back.

"What if I happen to talk about your miraculous resurrection to someone?" she called after him coldly, though with a gnawing ache in her chest.

He came to a sudden halt. With his back turned, he stated with a low voice that would have normally set the alarms in her head, "I trust you're not that foolish."

Lisa, with a challenging tone, chanced. "Because, what then? You'd kill me?"

The grave silence following her mocking words stunned her. Jackson turned around to look at her, his eyes obscured behind his hair and heavy, relentless eyelids. He descended the two steps he'd climbed. He stepped closer, and with that, Lisa took a step backwards. Backed against the doorframe, she looked up at him like she saw him for the first time for who he really was. He halted two steps away from her.

Suddenly, Lisa couldn't decide what to expect, he had the unpredictability of the man she couldn't grow fond of.

She flinched when he moved so close to her that their toes touched, and Lisa hated him for it, for how he managed to throw her around from one extremity to the other when she started to fancy that she finally figured his ways out.

Her eyes fell on his fists, the white knuckled balls of unyielding bone and freckled skin, sensing the ready to burst energy rippling under the surface. She lifted her head, just slightly frightened. Her forehead brushed his chin, so did the tip of her nose when she turned to meet his gaze. She wasn't sure if she could defend herself now – if there really was a chance she _had to_.

"You're not afraid of me, are you?" Jackson inquired slowly, not without a hint of menace.

He stared at her with a strange expression somewhere halfway from incredulity to grief. Her heart wanted to break out of her chest. Lisa didn't say a word, just eyed him cautiously. Her lips apart, frozen into expectant bewilderment. Was he really capable of hurting her? To her sorrow, she honestly didn't know the answer, and it wasn't right this way; there was no confidence between them. Nobody was able to build something on a ground like this.

He broke the tension with a jerky move. In that moment, he looked like a pierced balloon, with his arms fallen by his side as if suddenly all strength had left them. He swiped his palm across his forehead with a desperate sigh, making the tresses jumble at his temple. He'd risked a hell of a lot of things, fragile, delicate things to come here. Why couldn't she see it? Why wasn't it enough for her?

"Then I really have nothing to do here."

Lisa glared. Somehow, he looked more than comfortable with this statement. With the knee-jerk reflex of retrieving to well-known territory. He couldn't even see how pathetic, how cowardly it was, and Lisa wanted to hit him for it, for not thinking she was worth the risk.

"So this is it?"

He was all masked again, cool, unreadable. A flicker of his fingers, careless, easy, as he said: "This is it."

Something filled her, something wild and bitter. "I almost forgot how good you've always been in leaving things behind. Guess it'll take no time for you to get over this little mishap."

"I haven't forgotten how good you've always been in carrying painful things with you. Just a friendly advice: there's no point in carrying this one."

He whirled around, hurried upstairs, and soon returned with his bag. Lisa was still stuck to the doorframe, frozen into a wiry-muscled stance.

There, at the bottom of the stairs, they stared at each other. They were waiting for a word, a single sentence, with heart beating fast, but it had to be said by the other.

Stay.

I'll stay.

A moment of pause, a chance given, and another: a string of moments of silence. Moments of lack of words.

They couldn't. Pride, stubbornness, resignation, they formed an almost physical barrier.

Neither of them spoke. Jackson turned, and walked out the door, and with the resounding click of the lock, something died in her.

She didn't know, but something did so in him, too.

: :

There had been a few things in her twenty-seven-year lifespan Lisa had regretted, but in the following days, letting Jackson walk out of her life seemed to bloat into one of the greatest. She wanted to go back to work in the remaining three days before her flight back to Miami on Saturday, the good old diversion was pulling her mind, but the weak morning light found her fallen into million pieces. She just couldn't do it, couldn't go back to her previous life. It was irreversible. The mere thought of the dullness of her days made her feel empty, the shallow relations she maintained with the people around her, the boring activities she engaged in within the walls of her apartment weren't enough anymore. The safe escape from reality, from the past, the challenges wasn't a haven anymore, and she felt exposed and worn-out. She felt hollow like a chocolate figure that could be crushed with the gentlest touch.

_I want to feel like I did before_, she thought. _Before you._

But the wish touched the surface of her mind only for a moment before a strong wave of bittersweet regret of her own words swept it away. It was light as a leaf, and dry too, could not set root in her heart when she still cherished the feeling so carefully, despite the pain it caused.

He'd managed to bind her to him beyond anything he represented, anything that had been said and done between them, and that alone was a miracle. He destroyed her but most probably only because she let him. Without her, he couldn't have done it.

It was another loose thread of her life, and she feared that all those opportunities cut in half would ensnarl forever into a great mess of things she never cared to fight hard for.

_It will pass._

She told it to herself. _It will pass; maybe I will just fade a bit each day, dissolve around the edges_ – sometimes she really believed it was possible.

It hurt. It hurt so much as if she was bleeding inside. Instead of the lack of something substantial, the lack of him, it was a continuous swell in her chest that grew so enormous that it squeezed against her heart. It was painful, and incredible how much more insistent and unbearable it was than any physical pain she'd ever experienced. It made her feel like she would never be fine again, never be whole again. She was lying in her bed, crumpling the pillow under her head, and tried to fight the onrush of thought of him. That he was alive, he was out there somewhere and she'd never see him again. It was something she couldn't process. She watched the eerie lights running around on her walls as cars passed by outside, shadows growing and shrinking and growing again like the tension in her mind, and Lisa hugged her blanket to her chest so vehemently as if she was trying to stop and fight back the ever growing pain, trying to replace with fluff and cotton what it destroyed in its growth. Because something was destroyed, she knew it – there was no way that she could get out of such pain completely unharmed and intact.

I will never meet you.

I will never forget you.

She couldn't decide which frightened her more. With the first, she might have been able to cope with. What she was really afraid of was the latter. The possibility that it stayed with her forever, the swell, the wreck it left behind. And still, her heart grabbed after each and every detail of her possibly escaping memories, striving to preserve them, she clung onto them, onto the intangible small things, his voice, the mischievous glint in his eyes when he smiled. The crooked tooth in the front; the feel of his stubble when he didn't have time to shave. The hardness of his bones when she pressed her forehead to his cheek. The few grey hairs that she wasn't even sure he knew of, just right behind his left ear. The deep, harmonious sound when he laughed, a bit boyishly but definitely contagiously. The years he could deny when he did so, with the vigorous wrinkles on his cheeks. His scent. She missed it the most, and it was escaping her so easily: the first thing she subconsciously tried to find around her, in other people, among her own memories. Sometimes she just closed her eyes and tried to remember them, the fading details in the never fading storm of yearning, she forced her mind to retrieve the same feel so much that the effort stung her eye. She wanted to think it was the effort.

During the nights, the curtained-off days, she was musing. She knew it was a chance they wasted. They could have beaten the odds, should have tried to build something on those shaky grounds.

And hurt one another a way only people with great insight into each other could.

She knew that too.

She wanted it with him, no matter how rocky it might be, how unorthodox and abnormal. She had to accept that there were things that didn't fit in conventions and expectations; maybe it was her heart that didn't fit, after all. However banal it was, what she needed, or even deserved, wasn't necessarily what she wanted.

Why she could be so clever only in hindsight engraved her misery.

In the morning of Christmas Eve, Lisa packed her things and took a cab to the airport. It turned out, due to the heavy snowfall and the busy pre-holiday rush, her flight was delayed.

She was sitting there for an extra hour before check-in, watching people hurry by with their oversized luggage, watching them kiss welcome each other or say farewell. Never before had this hurt so much. She thought of him, thought how he would mock her now for being sentimental, and Lisa knew he was in her shaky smile now, in the twinkle of her eyes that she would deny that it had anything to do with unshed tears. She couldn't cry for him anymore; his imprint was too deep within her now.

At the gate, the crowd waiting for boarding was growing impatient by the minute. Lisa watched them with detachment; watched the holiday lights brim the shop windows along the corridors. It felt distant now, black and white, without depth or meaning. She was an outsider, lacking every feeling she would usually have fueling her, and it got worse at the thought that she had to go and celebrate it with her family. With these unspeakable emotions in her heart. It seemed to be a play now, a front she had to keep up, the old _I'm fine_'s again that she'd grown to hate so much. _He_ made her hate them, hate the lies, the pretense. How ironic that he was the one who'd shoved her into another row of false acts now.

An instinct started to emerge in her and grow, an urge to run, to flee, so strong that it felt it was stretching the skin on her legs like an enormous swell. Almost like a panic attack, but she knew it was, in a way, worse: a conviction that she was doing a mistake by being here. The full knowledge that she was not able to lead a life similar to the pre-Red Eye, and definitely to the pre-kidnapping period was almost unbearable and it pulled the rug of balance and security out from under her feet.

Lisa pushed herself away from the pillar she was leaning to, and searched for a bathroom to steal a few minutes of quality time with herself. She was lucky: only an old lady was in there, already about to leave.

She propped against the sink, and glared in the mirror. "Pull yourself together, Lisa."

She wanted to shake off the unreasonable feeling that boarding her plane would necessarily mean that she closed a period of her life – that something would be lost forever and irrevocably with it. That leaving Washington now wouldn't draw an irreversible ending to her story. To _their_ story.

If they had a story.

She tried to reason. It's not that there was anything she could do about it. There was no way to contact him, he had no known address, hell, she didn't even know his real name. He was like a ghost. Officially, he didn't exist anymore, only she was not able to move on without thinking of him.

"You didn't lose anything now," she thought. "Because you never really had anything, to begin with."

Lisa washed her hands, letting the cold water bubble against her skin. She tried to find peace of mind in it, coolness and clear-sight. She pushed the soap dispenser, and rubbed her hands. A bitter laugh started to gather in her chest at the twisted, ironic déjà vu feeling: at the memory of a small airplane restroom when she tried to gain control over her life almost in the same way. Both because of the same man. If someone back then had told her that one day she might be heartbroken because of him, she would have definitely not believed that. Her life had spiraled out of control ever since.

It was time to put it back in a safe rut.

: :

The line was moving annoyingly slowly, Jackson wondered if it was moving at all. He stared at the whirling snow beyond the glass panels, trying to shut out the unbearable Christmas hits coming from a stereo nearby. The kid before him chose that moment to start a tantrum. Unfortunately his parents employed the tactic of not paying attention to him, but it didn't really help.

_I need a coffee,_ Jackson thought. He left the line, knowing all too well that he needed more than a coffee as he looked at the Starbucks store front with a pang of yearning. Lisa. The thing is, the picture was crystal clear: he should've simply walked out of here, got in a cab and driven to her apartment.

He had no idea what he was still doing in Washington. Not that it made any difference where he spent the eventless, low season period of the holidays that tired him to no end. After he left Lisa, the thought of how it would have been to spend Christmas with her crossed his mind more times than he liked, and it didn't improve his low mood. He was slowly becoming a pathetic softy.

Michele invited him to spend some days with them in Springfield, but he was still reluctant to accept it – of course, Giovanna had already given him an extended call on the subject; she could be extremely persuading in that Italian way that was both charming and annoying simultaneously.

But he knew something, and it killed whatever pro that invitation had: it could be only a poor replacement of something he would never have.

: :

Three teenage girls barged into the restroom in the frenzy of makeup adjustment and too loud holiday plans, so Lisa chose to flee. Her plane wasn't boarding yet – the pre-reported one hour delay seemed to swell into a good ninety minutes wait. She felt better, calmer but a bit downhearted as she strolled down the corridor between golden-red-ribboned gift packs and Christmas-flavored doughnuts behind the shop displays.

And then, her focus sharpened; the balance of the world tipped, the horizon, too, as if she was drunk. Because under the green-black-white siren logo and in corporate caffeine steam, _he_ was sitting there.

She sensed the shapes, lines, objects lose their edge as she stared, incredulously, at his profile, at the set of cheekbones accentuated by the shifting lights as he tilted his head. Although he wore glasses, there was no way she could not recognize him by a mere movement of his hands. Lisa was standing there, in the middle of the airport, and couldn't believe he wasn't only the mere projection of her heart.

He was sipping from his paper cup when he caught her gaze.

She straightened; he stood up, halted in the middle of the smooth move. The airport, the world around them halted a bit, too; everything faded, quieted and shrank like the tin soldier in the flames. Amidst the rush hour of the airport, only they looked permanent as they stood motionless. And the twisted, pulsing bond between them: it was permanent, too. A cogwheel that had jumped out of its place sometime during the previous days without them realizing it, jolted back now as they stood there, dumbfounded by the improbability of it all. From the look on his face, she realized, for once, this was something he didn't orchestrate.

What were the odds? It was nothing if not fate. A second chance to play it in another way, in the right way this time.

And Lisa was standing there with her crumpled reasoning stuck to her skin in the previous days like mud, adhesive and alien, reasoning she had just come to in the restroom a few minutes before on how she should move on without him, and Jackson was standing there with his own.

He was waiting for her as she walked up to him with the unconcealed surprise on his face that Lisa loved so much because it told her there were things he couldn't control.

Jackson smiled, gestured toward the stool beside his. "Saved you a seat."

Lisa couldn't suppress a twisted little laughter that aroused from the happiness in her chest, and sat. They were _sick_; they fit so well.

From the corner of her eyes, she sensed him following her movements with the usual precision of an analyst. This was the first time she thought, maybe with the attention of a _painter_. She glanced up, let him know she caught him staring, but she stared, too.

Casually, like only he could in such situations, Jackson asked: "And what will we have?"

"Lattes. You still owe me one."

If he was incredulous, he didn't show. "Oh, right!" he nodded lightly, but when he wanted to stand to fetch her drink, Lisa caught his arm.

"Stay." She didn't have too much time, and the last thing she wanted to spend it with was waiting for him while he stood in the line.

Lisa watched him as Jackson sank back on his stool, cataloged the tiny details of his camouflage like they were her own new purchase. Jackson was wearing a tie and even a waistcoat; a sharp, pristine look, if slightly nondescript. Close up, she saw that he had simple glass in the rectangular frame as his eyes weren't distorted behind them. To a stranger, she could determine, he looked innocent, maybe a bit boring too, like a just graduated, somewhat tightass instructor at Psychology class who the students might think they could relate with, just because he was close to their age. For her, he appeared the kind who could make students jump out the window because he failed them at the final exam plainly out of pure cruelty. The smile was the only thing on his face that told her otherwise. It was genuine, a bit awed – she couldn't really blame him for it.

Her eyes sparkled. "This new look… What's next? You pull a sack over your head?"

Jackson winked at her. "No way, I'm too handsome to that."

Lisa laughed. He was so annoyingly, alluringly cocksure.

"Miami?" he asked lightly. There were no pleasantries, no courtesy talk about how she was, how surprising that they met, and Lisa liked it this way. They'd never been famous for social manner when they were together, and it made her contented: the lack of pretense.

She smiled. "Yes, on a delayed flight. Again. Going home for Christmas. You?"

A pause. The usual one he was always giving her, the one she hated so much. This time, though, he elaborated. "Chicago. For now. Maybe I end up in Springfield."

"Say hi to Giovanna for me."

There was a strange glint in his eyes, something Lisa had never seen before, it made his features soften. She didn't know that this was the first time he felt they'd known each other for a very long time – not _he_ knew her like every time before; no: it was something mutual now. And unexpectedly, Jackson liked the feeling.

He looked to the side for a moment, a slight hesitation on his lips. Lisa watched him, the almost imperceptible movements of his eyes, the fair freckles around his nose. He looked pale in the brown dress shirt he was wearing under the dark coat. She longed to hug him, to kiss the edge of his jawline just below his ears.

Jackson gazed toward his gate, the shrinking line, searching for something to say. Never before had he dealt with such problem. He looked back at her, roaming her face. She seemed haggard, tired. _Do I also look this bad?_ he mused. _So shattered?_

He was sure he did.

Her gaze had a dreamy, soft edge to it. "Isn't this just symbolic? An airport…"

"I'd call it ironic."

"That too. But see, there're so many ways out. Where do we go from here?"

He had a mischievous glint in the depth of his eyes. "Probably the best way is where we came. Just go back to your apartment, shut the door behind us and forget about the world."

Lisa stole a sip from his cup, swallowed the already cold coffee together with a sense of regret. "I can't. I have to take this plane."

"I know. It's okay."

"Greg's coming with his wife, too, and…"

Gently, he emphasized. "Lisa, I said it's fine."

Lisa looked down, with unseeing eyes, she followed the grouts between the tiles under her stool. Was there a remark that didn't sell her out too much? But it didn't matter anymore. It made her be the weaker this time, and in a certain aspect, also the stronger. She slipped her fingers around his wrist, just below the shirt sleeve, brushing the skin like she knew she had the right to; like she was aware of the effect it had on him. She placed her fingertips softly on his veins, lightly, intimately – as if to chain him with delicate bone and flesh and skin handcuffs.

Jackson pulled her to him, or it was Lisa who moved first – it didn't really matter. He buried his face in the familiar auburn waves, the familiar scent, and smiled a smile that he knew only she could draw on his face.

She pressed her nose to his neck, just above his collar as she whispered, "I come back on Wednesday."

His lips glided across her cheek, and touched hers so softly like it was only accidental. All thoughts escaped through an invisible valve in her head as if a vacuum suck them out. The sensation was just as overwhelming as for the first time. Lisa clung onto him and returned the kiss crushingly, with the yearning she'd thought just a day ago that she had to bury forever. His stubble was scratching her skin, his teeth, as he grazed her lips, left sweetly aching lines behind but she moved closer nonetheless. It was always like that with him: pleasure and pain, hot and cold, good and bad. Always the extremes. And she knew she was matching his with her own.

She mumbled against his lips, "I'm not planning anything on New Year's Eve."

Jackson drew back slightly and stared at her. His unusual gaze was unwavering on her. Lisa could spot a shadow pass across his face, darken his eyes, deepen the line between his brows.

Faint indecision twitched around his lips. Was it symbolic, too, he wondered. New Year, new start. New life. _Clean_ life? He wasn't too comfortable with the possibility that she meant it exactly this way. He wasn't one to accept conditions, ultimatums from anyone, not even Lisa. He knew what he wanted, even if those weren't anything reconcilable. Or anything fair to her.

So he went with the words closest to the truth.

"Lisa, I can't be what you want me to be…" his gaze swam somewhere behind her, and nowhere in particular. He couldn't see the expression on her face, the unconcealed feeling of loss. Lisa pressed her lips together. She couldn't go through this again, not after giving up, then meeting him again. Why were they to run into each other now, if it was meant to be over anyhow? Could life be really so ironic? His fingers touching her elbow brought her back from her unfolding misery. He had a small smile on his mouth. "But you know, I can try something in-between."

She bit her lip as strange, twisted relief spread over her. The last sober voice of reason made her to be cautious. Could she really? Where would it lead them? Could she bare her heart and risk it'd be crushed again?

"This is the best I can offer."

His voice was grave, hard, but all Lisa could hear was the hidden plea behind it, and her heart started to beat lively.

She smiled. It was good enough. Good enough for now.

_The End_

* * *

**A/N:** So that was it. For the last time, I'd really appreciate if you told me how it is. After spending so much time on the ending, I really cannot tell if it sucks or not. Tell me even if it's horrible. I know some/most of you might be disappointed that I didn't throw them in an M-rated scene, sorry, the time frame just didn't let me without making Lisa OOC;)

Maybe in a sequel, haha. I was planning one, but seeing the difficulties I had in the end with writing this, I'm not so sure anymore. Leave me a comment if you'd be interested, though, in the twisted relationship these two could build.

For now, bye and thanks everyone!


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